


Truant

by CourierNew



Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Gen, Post-Pacifist Route, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-07
Updated: 2016-08-06
Packaged: 2018-07-22 01:53:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 35,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7413970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CourierNew/pseuds/CourierNew
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Underground goes empty. Someone remains.</p><p>Occurs after the events of "One by One."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Guest

**Author's Note:**

> If I stay here, trouble will find me.  
> If I stay here, I'll never leave.  
> If I stay here, trouble will find me  
> I believe.  
> \- The National, "Sea of Love"

Soon after the Underground went empty, all the lights began to flicker. The Core fell dormant as switches and safeguards went off in its inscrutable innards, as if that great machine had somehow detected the monsters’ escape, the quiet they left behind. Elevators sputtered, and lurched, and became still. Across New Home, lamps and lightposts buzzed and dimmed, leaving the city to be illuminated only by the swathes of luminescent fungus that crept across its strangely organic architecture. TV screens became useless squares of black glass; the MTT Hotel’s riot of color fled. And Snowdin’s own warm light – the buttery yellow that had shone through the inn’s windows, the Christmas bulbs strung up along its sign – faded as well, leaving the town muted and leaden under the softly falling snow. All that could be heard was the sighing of the wind, and the distant babble of the streams nearby.

Then, gradually, a new sound. Crunching footsteps, two by two, underlined by a persistent, cantankerous mutter:

“…blatant bipedalism, is what it is. Whoever designed that capital ought to be smacked. ‘Ooh, look at _me_ , I’ve got _hands_ and _thumbs_ and everything, suppose I’ll put a thousand _doors_ all over the place just so those no-good four-leggers can’t go anywhere without giving themselves a blasted concussion.’ There should’ve been a law…”

Through the snow and mist emerged an ominous silhouette, all twitching mandibles and ornate horns. Then the fog parted and Gyftrot pushed his way through. All four of his eyes were squinted with fatigue, his legs shook, and his head was bowed – through that last one may have been due to the four loaded satchels hanging from his antlers. After all the time spent trying to get Snowdin’s teenagers to stop hanging their garbage on his head, now he was forced to decorate himself. It was so funny he wanted to cry.

When King Asgore had finally given the all-clear to leave the Underground, the commotion had been tremendous. Even from his secluded hideaway in the Snowdin woods, Gyftrot had practically felt the ground rumble underfoot from the stampede of monsters ready to see the sun for the first time in centuries. But as far as he was concerned, the sun wasn’t anything to scream about, it was big and hot and so full of itself that it left for half the day and didn’t even tell anyone where it was going, and getting a look at that nonsense wasn’t worth the trouble. So he’d stayed behind, and cherished the opportunity to finally go for a walk without some juvenile ne’er-do-well creeping up behind him and affixing a festive wreath to his face. He’d been completely alone and having a wonderful time.

But then, of course, supplies around Snowdin Town had started running low, and he’d had to go elsewhere for food. The Ruins had been picked clean, oddly enough, so that just left the long, muddy, hot, exhausting hike to the Capital every few days, which, for all its vaunted architecture, was a pain in the backside to get around for the quadrupedally-inclined. And that wasn’t even getting into the confounded tree roots snaking all over the Underground these days – apparently the tree itself had just popped up out of nowhere after the barrier broke, so big that the cavern behind the King’s throne room could barely fit it, and now you couldn’t take a dozen steps without having to clamber over some knotty length of wood heaving out of the ground.

Gyftrot stopped on Snowdin Town’s main street and angled his head this way and that, the satchels swaying like wind chimes. The snow was piling up in ever-deeper drifts, but besides that, the street had gone bare; even the Christmas tree had been taken away, probably stripped of its decorations and retired to somewhere in the woods. That was a shame. He would’ve been glad to smash the horrid thing to splinters himself.

The Librarby door was open a crack. He huffed out steam and trotted over to it, gingerly pushing it open further with his aching forehead.

No one there. The library’s selection of books had never amounted to much, but the townsfolk had picked it clean before leaving for the surface; even that awful, off-tempo clock had been taken off the wall. But a few new books were on the shelves now, most of them textbooks, their spines rippled and water-warped. They’d been arranged with exacting neatness, tallest to shortest. One of them lay open on the reading table next to a spiral notebook and the oblong glass of an MTT-brand lantern (“Sparkle Up Your Night!” ™). The lantern was unlit, but in the dim ivory light that came from outside, Gyftrot could make out arithmetic problems on the paper, rows of numbers that quickly gave way to lashings of frustrated scrawl.

He grunted, awkwardly gripped the doorknob in his mandibles, and pulled it shut.

Further down the road. He had to stop and brace himself against the gusts of wind and stinging snow; the climate in this part of the Underground was never too welcoming, but it seemed to be getting even colder than usual lately. The Snowed Inn stood stalwart against the weather, its façade chalked with frost. The front door was shut tight. With effort, Gyftrot angled his head up to the second floor. The windows there stared out blindly.

“Hey!” he called. “You home?”

No answer.

“Come on, don’t make me knock! I’ve been opening doors with my face all day and I need a-”

Then he looked down and saw the front door was already open.

Even now, that little habit gave him the creeps. There were a lot of slightly off-putting things about the inn’s newest, and probably last, resident, but the way he opened doors was somehow the worst – it could have hinges covered with a decade of rust and wood so splintery it’d fall apart if you looked at it cross-eyed, but if he opened it, it’d glide open smooth and quiet as an oiled ball bearing on silk. If it was magic, then it wasn’t any kind Gyftrot had ever seen before.

The entrance was only open a crack. On the other side, a stripe of impenetrable dark. Gyftrot sidled up to it. He felt unseen eyes bore through him.

“Made another supply run,” he said. “Got some things here…couple books, pen and paper, a few cartons of Sea Tea, some of those candy bars you like. The usual. Here.” He offered his right-hand antlers to the darkness. “These two bags are yours.”

Silence again. The kid never thanked Gyftrot for these gifts. He barely ever spoke at all, which was exactly why Gyftrot liked him. But after a moment he felt the weight lift off half his head, and looked back to see a small five-fingered hand pull back into the shadows, the skin marble-pale. The door swung shut again.

“Hey, wait, wait!”

Against his better judgement, he knocked his head against the door before it closed completely. That unseen stare turned piercing.

“I, uh, just wanted to let you know this’ll probably be the last of it. I’m leaving soon. The Underground, I mean. Going to the surface.”

Still no answer. But the silence somehow became accusatory.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Far as I’m concerned it still probably won’t be all that great, but I’ve gotten my share of peace and quiet down here. I’m going a little stir-crazy. Talking to myself. Talking too much. I didn’t talk this much when we first met, did I?”

The silence indicated that this was probably the truth.

“Besides, it'll start snowing up there soon, and I don’t want to make that hike through _this_ stuff.” He stomped on a nearby snow poff with one spindly leg, then shivered as the gale picked up again. “Hey, do you mind if I pop in for a couple of minutes? I’d like to get out of this chill. Be nice to say goodbye properly, too, don’t you think?”

The dark remained voiceless. But after a moment, Gyftrot felt that penetrating gaze leave him. He stepped forward, hesitantly, and then pushed open the door.

The inn’s lobby was empty, covered in a veil of murk. The walls groaned as the wind hammered against them, but that was the only sound – the kid had presumably gone back upstairs, but try as he might, Gyftrot couldn’t even hear a creaking plank in the place. He’d met ghosts that made more noise than this.

After a lot of effort and several swear words, he wrestled the last two satchels off his head and left them by the entrance, then went to the foot of the stairs and looked up. There were more lanterns off to the side, but they were all unlit, so that the staircase turned all but invisible less than halfway up. He gulped and took the steps one at a time, carefully feeling his way through the dark. Of the rooms upstairs, one had its door slightly ajar. Reddish-orange light spilled from its outline like fever.

Gyftrot began to say something, realized no one would answer, then shook his head, steeled himself, and stepped into the room.

“Oh…hey, this is actually pretty nice.”

 The Snowed Inn had been left mostly untouched during the monsters’ exodus, so all of the furniture here was intact – the twin bed, the nightstand and table, the faded pink carpet with its delicate heart embroidery. Even with its new resident, it was largely unchanged. The lamp in the far corner had flickered out, of course, but several more MTT Lanterns filled the place with their soft, warm glow, and the only other additions consisted of Gyftrot’s offerings, books and juice cartons and chocolate bars that had mostly been reduced to bare wrappers. These artifacts were arranged on the table and in the corners of the room with punishing neatness – the books stacked perpendicular to the table corners, the Sea Tea arranged geometrically besides the door. Even the candy wrappers were stacked with that same neurotic precision.

The kid was on the bed, sitting crosslegged, already chewing his chocolate. His tattered green shirt stood out in sharp contrast to the lanterns’ light, and under the ragged curtain of his hair, dark eyes watched Gyftrot impassively.

“Hi,” Gyftrot said, for want of anything better.

The kid gripped the candy between his teeth, broke off a piece with a sound like a snapping twig, and kept chewing.

He looked familiar, somehow, but Gyftrot was certain they’d never met before the Underground had gone empty – he’d have remembered anyone with this attitude, not to mention that stare, the eyes flat and cold as two specks of mud. He hadn’t been so frosty when Gyftrot had first stumbled across him, though. He’d been on his way home when he’d noticed the entrance to Grillby’s open a crack, and poked his head in to see the kid, a bent-limbed green smear against the bar’s back wall, picking up and examining the glassware with clinical efficiency, several root beer and cola bottles already liberated from Grillby’s old stores. Then he’d stiffened up, and turned to see Gyftrot there in the doorway, and while he still hadn’t made a sound, he’d practically cleared the bar in a single leap and started smashing against the back exit so hard that Gyftrot still winced a little to think about it. The kid couldn’t leave that way – it was the fire door, after all, and he wasn’t made of fire – but he’d looked as if he’d have been happy to light a match and solve that little problem himself until Gyftrot had calmed him down. He’d seemed to relax a lot after being assured that they were the only two monsters still down here.

They’d mostly kept to themselves after that. The kid must have occupied his time somehow, since he wasn’t always at the library or at the inn, but Gyftrot quickly gave up on trying to find out his hobbies, as well as his name, age or where his parents had gone – any questions shriveled up and died under that glowering, oppressive muteness of his. He took Gyftrot’s supplies, and left the empty satchels outside the inn when he was done with them, but other than that he was so unobtrusive that it was like he didn’t exist at all. Gyftrot couldn’t have asked for a better neighbor, at least until the Underground’s newfound emptiness had started to gnaw at him.

The kid continued to stare. He didn’t seem to be in any hurry to start conversation. The chocolate bar was already half-eaten.

“You should be okay fending for yourself,” Gyftrot volunteered. “Everyone pretty much just grabbed what they could and took off, there’s enough food and stuff in the Capital alone to last someone a hundred years. Just got to be careful not to fall down, or something.”

There was a sound like a clogged drain. It took a moment for him to realize that the kid had just laughed.

“Something funny?”

“No.”

The voice toneless and harsh as radio feedback. The kid’s face hadn’t changed a jot. The way he stared made all of Gyftrot’s eyes try to turn in different directions.

“You could come with, if you want. I won’t let you ride me or anything, but we could figure something out.”

“I’m staying.”

Worth a try. “Yeah, that’s fair. I’m still not looking forward to all the hustle and bustle up above, but I guess there’s worse things.”

“You might find some of them.” He took another bite, chewed, swallowed. “Remember why everyone was trapped underground in the first place. The surface is the humans’ world. Monsters don’t stand a chance up there.”

“Nah, everyone’s doing okay from what I heard.” The kid’s brow rose. “Yeah, I didn’t tell you, but we actually got a visitor a while back – Muffet, you know her? Eight limbs, big on pastries, giggles way too much? She came to get the last of the spiders out of the Ruins, even brought along a couple of Vulkins to keep ‘em warm. That girl gives me the creeps, honestly, but she sure knows how to throw her weight around.” The kid’s eye twitched. “Sorry, I’m rambling. Anyway, I ran into her on the way out and we chewed the fat for a little while. Apparently she’s got her own bakery now. Partnered up with Grillby too, they do catering. I don’t know who to pity more, him or their customers.”

The kid didn’t say anything, but Gyftrot got the impression that he wanted something more. He tilted his head as he tried to remember.

“Uh, let me see…well, those two idiot skeletons became monsterkind’s ambassadors, whatever that means, but the tall one does all the talking and the short one does all the work. That last part’s hard to believe from what I know of him, but whatever, could just be rumor. That Snow Drake punk actually started trying to do standup, God help him, the kid’s jokes could peel paint. Oh, and Madjick’s a street magician, which really rubs me the wrong way. We’re monsters, all of us can do magic anyway, but he puts on a stupid hat and says ‘hocus pocus’ a lot and suddenly he thinks he’s better than-”

“What about the Dreemurrs?”

Gyftrot stopped short and blinked. His mandibles flexed in surprise. As far as he could recall, this was the first time the kid had ever actually asked a question.

“Well. Hmm.” He cleared his throat. “They’re all right, I guess? King Asgore’s still doing kingly stuff, trying to get everyone settled in. Muffet said he’s a gardener at the Queen’s school, too. I guess we have a Queen and she has a school? Go figure.” He shrugged, or came as close as one could to shrugging without shoulders. “Their kids go there, too. You know, the human and the other one who came back from the dead or something. Don’t even ask me how _that_ happened.”

The kid finished the chocolate bar and held the depleted wrapper in his hand. His face had turned downcast, but Gyftrot didn’t notice.

“No idea how it’ll work out, humans and monsters under the same roof, but they seem to be getting along okay so far. I met the human once, he was nice enough. Took some stuff off my head.” Gyftrot stopped, looked back at the kid, and squinted. Then his eyes all widened. “Hey, _that’s_ who you remind me of!”

The candy wrapper crackled in the kid’s fist.

“Yeah, it’s been driving me crazy since we met. But you do sort of look like that human who fell down here. Even though your clothes aren’t-”

“I think you should leave now.”

The words dried up in Gyftrot’s throat. The kid’s voice was the same as always, no change in pitch or inflection or intonation, so he wasn’t sure why it suddenly sounded like the wind blowing off ten thousand miles of ice.

“…sorry,” he said at last. “You’re right. Shouldn’t bend your ear like this. I’ve got to get going anyway.” He took a couple steps back, and added, “My other two bags are by the front door. You can have them. Should be enough in there to keep you going for another few days, at least.”

“I don’t want them.”

“Well, I’m not going to throw my back out trying to hook my antlers on the stupid things again, so you’re stuck with them. Toss them into the snow if you want, I don’t care.”

He turned and grabbed the doorknob in his mouth, then heard:

“You were alone.”

Gyftrot looked up and glanced behind him. The kid was looking away now, regarding him out of the corner of his eye.

“If anyone asks, that’s what you say. Don’t tell them you saw me.”

“Sure. You want your privacy. I get it.” He paused, then turned around again. “You really should think about leaving, though. The Underground’s got nothing left. I mean, I stuck around to finally get some time to myself, and I got it. Why are you still here?”

The kid stayed quiet for so long Gyftrot thought he was being ignored again. But then, in a voice even lower than usual, he said, “I don’t know.”

And that was all; no further conversation seemed forthcoming. Gyftrot sighed, opened the door, and left. As he descended the stairs, the light from the kid’s room narrowed and vanished. He’d closed the door behind him. As usual, it hadn’t made a sound.

Gyftrot stepped out into the cold and started for the woods outside town – one last trip to get his den tidied up before he took off for good. As he walked, he stole a glance behind him at the Snowed Inn’s windows. Through the frost-smothered glass he thought he saw a silhouette, one hand pressed up against the pane.

Then the wind gusted again, and drove fresh snow into his eyes. He winced, looked away, and kept walking. The snow ate up his outline, and over the next few days it did the same for his footprints, all evidence of his comings and goings through Snowdin Town. He left like the rest, and didn’t come back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again. This is a short-ish idea I had for an alternative ending to my "One by One" fic, which technically makes it non-canon to my own canon (which is also non-canon). Still, I hope you enjoy.


	2. The Winter

Here was the statue, where no music played.

Chara stood before it with his hands in his pockets, as expressionless as the stone itself. His legs were filthy, claggy with mud from the knees down. Without the bridges, the River Person or the weirdly generous ferry-monster to transport people across the swamp, he was forced to take other, less pleasant paths to get around Waterfall. The damp and the chill squirmed around him, through him, but he barely noticed it. He’d felt much worse.

He’d learned that dying was endless cold. On the night he and Asriel had returned from the surface, Asriel hopelessly broken and muttering apologies and him already dead once and too livid to speak, he’d already felt the dark closing in as their souls weakened and prepared to shatter. But when they had, and the last of them sifted into the ground below, his anger had stayed. It had tethered him, somehow, so that one moment he’d been in Asriel’s body, hearing his final plea for help, and then he’d felt the last cord of their lives snap and found himself somewhere above, looking down at their remains. And it had been cold. So cold.

He’d had no limbs to move or lungs to breathe, but it had still felt like it was wading through icicles and sucking in vapor. He’d been an insinuation, substantial as a stray thought, navigating through the dark. Because it had been dark, too – the world had irised in to a circle no bigger than a fist, with crawling shadow across all the rest of his vision. Like his death had been put on pause. He’d been forced to view the living world through a pinhole. If the dark fell completely he could have moved on, but he either hadn’t wanted to or wasn’t able. He couldn’t remember clearly anymore, thinking that far back.

Chara reached out to the statue and placed his palm on its blank face. He felt the stone rasp against his palm, the rainwater trickle across the webs of his fingers.

It was still difficult, the return of sensation. The first time he’d eaten something after coming back again he’d nearly passed out, unused to any kind of taste at all after so much time. Sometimes he just picked a wall and leaned against it for minutes on end, feeling the pressure against his skull, the air seep through his clothes. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do.

He stepped away from the statue and continued down the path. The roots grew thicker here than anywhere else, leeching away the crystalline blue water of the marshes. They coursed underfoot, or erupted through cracks in the walls, or hung from the ceiling like strange party streamers. Where they dipped into the water, he could see thin blue lines running up their length like capillaries, feeding the great tree that now stood in the barrier cavern. Gyftrot had been gone for a week now.

Here was the central cavern, with its view of the Capital and the castle beyond. All gone dim now, with the greater silhouette of the tree looming in the far distance. Here were its roots, coursing like worms through the marshes and across the path, climbing the Capital’s walls in their embrace. Chara’s footsteps splashed across the stone. He shed mud like fallen scales. He did his best not to look at the roots. Every one was a reminder of his defeat and humiliation.

*   *   *

Here was Home, and the bedroom where no one slept.

Chara squatted beside the chest of children’s shoes Toriel had collected over the years, its contents spread out in neat ranks before him, stained orange by his lantern. His own shoes, threadbare beneath their plating of mud and with one sole already coming detached, lay next to him. He picked one up, compared its size to the others. Then he started trying them on.

The Ruins had been mostly untouched after the barrier broke – there’d never been many monsters down here anyway, and the ones that had lived here were too small and weak to carry much. He’d at least expected Toriel to clear out her things, but it looked like she’d only taken her diary and left the rest to gather dust. He would pull open drawers and cabinets and see the relics she’d gathered for the other children who’d fallen, unsolved puzzles, crayons that were barely dulled. None of them had stayed long. He’d seen that himself.

He pulled on a sneaker and grimaced. It was so narrow his toes felt all mashed together.

When he’d been dead, what he’d wanted more than anything was a way to keep out the cold. Anger did the job as well as anything else. And there had been plenty of that – through his little gap in the world he’d watched Asgore swear revenge on humankind only to sag with regret seconds later, the monsters march off oblivious and satisfied, their King and Queen flee back into their castle and into crushing, frigid silence. Even now, he knew it was Asriel they’d really mourned. He’d been a footnote. A prop. None of them would even say his name. And when Toriel had finally lost her patience with the useless King, she’d carried his body away and buried it where no one would even know a grave could be found. He’d spent a long time hanging over the flowers that grew there, hating all of them. The monsters who were cowardly and complacent, the King and Queen who’d decided to stew in their regrets, the humans who refused to die no matter what he tried. Asriel.

These shoes fit well enough. He pulled the laces tight, carefully replaced the rest in the trunk, then glanced over at his old ones. They looked like giant beetles squatting there on the carpet. He picked them up and left the bedroom, shutting the door behind him. It closed without a click.

He’d tried to live here for a few days after the Underground went empty, and couldn’t. It was too familiar.

Toriel’s house was cleaner than ever, save for the dirt he’d tracked on his way in. All the books arranged by size on their shelves, her gardening tools arrow-straight, the fireplace swept out, the fur pulled from the sink. He dropped the ruined shoes in the kitchen trash and stepped out into the Ruins, past the leafpile that clustered around the dead tree. He’d thought about raking them away while he was tidying up the house, but there was nowhere to put them, and so he’d left that part alone.

The rest of the Ruins had also been swept clean, though he’d had nothing to do with that – it was as though the monsters had left so fast they’d sucked away all clutter in their slipstream. There weren’t even cobwebs left. Ribbons of mist curled like cats around the high stones. He maneuvered through the puzzles without thinking about it. He’d watched the fallen humans navigate them so many times the patterns were burned into his mind.

He’d tried to take matters into his own hands, with those children. Once someone fell down here it was kill or be killed – Asgore, reluctant or not, had cornered himself into gathering souls, and his own soul was the key needed to pass through the barrier at all. But Chara, mired in ice and full of wrath, didn’t see any reason to stop there. He couldn’t be seen or heard but sometimes people would shiver when they passed him by and if he whispered into their ears for long enough they would grimace and shake their heads as if trying to wake from a bad dream, and so he’d stuck to those fallen children, hiding in the shadows of their determination, and spoke to them all the while: there’s only one way out. You need to become strong. Kill them all. Do them in. I will guide your hand.

He’d made progress, with some of them. But none had lasted long enough to even come close to their goal; their determination faltered every time. Useless. Useless.

He’d haunted the Underground after each death, no longer feeling or even understanding the passage of time. He’d dealt, briefly, with that one scientist squatting in the newly-created Core – and of course that’s where all the trouble really began, with that broken man and his mad carnival of impossible machines, seeking Chara out, not killing him, because he wasn’t alive enough to die, but making him _lesser_ somehow, so that even the ether of his spirit seemed to drain away as the scientist continued to work, unwriting him from the world one line at a time. Chara had found himself drawn to the Core and then found that the monsters’ experiments in there had made them close enough to touch; he’d waited until they were alone and then grabbed them and pulled them into the writhing shadow and left only dust behind. He hadn’t had so much fun in ages.

But it had passed, and he’d been alone again. Even when Asriel came back to life through some absurd chain of coincidence – Asriel, who was the reason they’d failed and yet had still gotten more of a second chance that he ever did – he still couldn’t hear Chara’s voice. He’d called his name constantly, deaf to Chara’s answers, and eventually Chara had stopped talking, stopped listening, and instead waited for the last sacrifice to fall.

Here were the flowers, earth shot yellow and green. Chara knelt among them, his grimy shirt briefly camouflaged in their colors. That bittersweet citrus scent was thick enough to make his eyes water.

His body was here, right beneath his feet. Bones so old they’d no doubt turned to dust. He’d died like the monsters after all. It just took a little longer than usual.

He craned his head up and saw the pit overhead crosshatched with tree roots, its periphery bulging and warped from their eruption. He wondered if Frisk had done that on purpose; there’d never been any way to tell, with him. The fading light from overhead was ashen and grey, and the breeze that trickled down bit his bare skin. Clouds and chill. Winter, rolling in.

He wouldn’t be able to come here anymore. Snowdin was just too much of a tribulation to hike through carelessly, especially since he wasn’t dressed for it, and there wasn’t a scrap of food left to be found in the whole Ruins. This flower patch had stood unchanged for years. He trusted it would do fine without him.

He rose to his feet and stepped back. Here was where Frisk and Asriel had sat and talked at the end of every loop, solemn and bent as monks. Weighed down by the consequences Frisk had been so desperate to avert. Chara had tried to use that desperation to his advantage, but he’d underestimated him, right up to the end.

“Goodbye,” he said, but didn’t know to whom.

*   *   *

Here was the throne room, overgrown again.

After some searching he’d found a knife that wasn’t too dull, and kept it down here for when he needed to come and cut away the weeds again. He did so now, pruning away the green shoots among the swaying golden flowers, sliding the blade along the vines that snaked across the walls. His hands were stained with plant juices, the yellow stripes on his shirt growing greener. It smelled like sweet lemons and cut grass. The two thrones, side by side, offered no comment.

He’d changed the yellowed sheet on Toriel’s old throne, and covered up Asgore’s as well. He’d then dragged hers back to its old spot, though it had nearly toppled over and crushed him once or twice. He wasn’t sure why he’d done it. It just felt important to have everything in place.

The knife blade twisted in his hand and the pad of his finger stung hot. He hissed air and pulled his hand away, seeing the blood well up from the shallow cut. He put it in his mouth and tasted the saltpenny warmth. Still bleeding. Still human, or something like it.

Frisk had been different.

Chara had failed to entice the other fallen humans, but he’d at least made his presence known, ephemeral as it was – he drifted at their side and watched their spirits falter as their predicament became clear, or saw them strike down monsters with his encouragement, doing it more easily every time. He’d drawn some warmth from their determination’s embers. But Frisk – wild-haired, heavy-lidded, and bearing nothing but a stick and a band-aid turned grey-green with unspeakable grime – had been more like a furnace at full blast. He didn’t smile or cry and he barely spoke but that thin little frame had marched through the Underground unstoppable as a glacier. And he wouldn’t fight, no matter how much Chara harangued him or how close he clung. He shrugged off Chara’s presence as casually as his ever-mounting number of deaths. Chara had been incredulous. Humans weren’t like this. _No one_ was like this.

But he’d continued on until Asgore and even Asriel had fallen, bloodlessly, peacefully, and then the barrier had broken and the Underground gone empty. And that was when Chara had started to panic, because that meant his last dim chance would be out of reach forever. The surface world had nothing for him. He’d be drifting through the caverns until he finally learned how to die properly, with nothing avenged or resolved. Until he’d seen Frisk’s and Asriel’s last meeting in the flowers. The regret etched on Frisk’s face. And then he’d realized his opportunity. He’d changed tactics, stuck to Frisk’s side a bit longer, coerced him into commanding every monumental inch of that determination and rewinding the world until he found a solution. Chara’s thinking had been simple – if he couldn’t move on, no one could. Even if Frisk didn’t eventually break under the pressure, kill out of frustration, his resets would pin the world in place better than Asriel’s attention-deficit reign of terror ever did. And when Frisk found himself back in this room, in another time, at the crucial moment, Chara had seen an even better path to take. Recover his own soul. Get Asriel back. Seize his power. Make it right. Tear down everything that had ever been until it was just the two of them, and then, finally, rest.

It had gone wrong. Again and again, it all went wrong.

He wiped the knife on the leg of his shorts and bundled up the weeds in his other fist. He couldn’t just let them stay on the ground. If they touched soil they’d sprout all over again.

The sun was setting earlier and earlier; dusk lay on the throne room like rust. That suited him fine. When he felt sunlight he just remembered his and Asriel’s disastrous trip to the surface – that was what had stuck with him the most, not the pain or the noise or the smell of the flowers all around, but the burning sun, beating on the back of their shared neck. His stomach lurched just remembering that heat.

At least when he’d first woken up again, right in front of these thrones, it had been the dead of night. That was a small mercy.

He’d conceded defeat, back then. Broken his newly regained soul and put himself out of everyone’s reach for good. He’d savored the look of shock on Frisk’s face when the soul shattered, felt the world fade out, the cold finally receding. But he’d done it wrong again. He still didn’t regret his actions, but now there was the question of what came next. If there would be a judgement. All his sins remembered. And as the last fading shards of his soul fell he’d recoiled from the dark and felt the frost leap back all at once, and he remembered panicking with what mind he had left, the terror that he’d be trapped in that miserable in-between state again and felt that terror anchoring him to the world further, and then there had been a _sound_ , a fingersnap, and the cold and the fear had been replaced by nothing at all. Just a sense of pressure, slowly receding. Like an invalid buried deep in fever-dreams and struggling, inch by inch, to wake up.

And then he’d woken up.

Bolting upright, gasping breath, deafened by the pounding of new blood in his ears, the machinery of a heartbeat after so much silence. The moonlight cold and silver on his dust-streaked skin. Hands clutching at his shirt, clutching at each other, refusing to believe their own solidity. His body again, but not just his body, because his clothes were still gray with Asriel’s remains and, he’d realized, grabbing his neck, his locket was missing. Because Frisk had taken it – he’d dangled it in front of Chara after his defeat, offering to give it back. This was the body he’d left behind in Dr. Gaster’s duplicated moment, where his and Asriel’s souls had finally been retrieved. And when he’d crept back into New Home on shaking legs, clutching every wall to keep upright, he’d found the Dreemurr family’s house already stripped bare. Everyone else had moved on.

Asriel was responsible, somehow. That was the only thing he knew for sure. At the end of every loop he’d restored the bodies of every monster he’d obliterated when seizing their souls for his own, returned what was theirs after borrowing their power to shatter the barrier. Maybe the remnants of his own soul had been caught in that wave, restored and jettisoned through time and space to find the most suitable vessel they could. It was impossible to say. Either way, it had been a mistake; Asriel had turned out to be a hopeless klutz even with godlike power at his fingertips. He was alive again by accident.

He stepped out through the back of the throne room, down the hall, and then tossed the bundle of weeds and vines on the ground. This, at least, was one place he didn’t bother to keep clean.

Here was the barrier cavern, where the great tree grew. When Chara had been ready to strike Frisk down, the stick Frisk had carried with him through all those resets flared with his determination and grew until its root bed pierced through the whole Underground and its trunk was almost as wide as the exit to the cavern itself. Those roots had come alive, snapping like whips and rebuffing Chara’s every blow; they’d defeated him with almost casual ease.

The canopy of leaves overhead, still so green they made the cavern’s roof look plated with emeralds, rustled as he approached. He thought they sounded just a little bit smug.

His footsteps squelched in puddles of shallow slime as he clambered atop the roots and carefully went around the tree’s perimeter. The wood rough as Braille under his palms. He crawled until he reached the other side of the trunk, and then sat down, gripping his arms against the chill.

Even with the barrier broken, he couldn’t quite see the surface world from here. The cavern’s open mouth was a fuzzed wall of bruised sunset light, tinging grey as clouds crept back in. The ground around the exit was dusted with blown snow, fine as sugar. It was cold enough for him to see his breath but the tree didn’t seem bothered in the least; on the contrary, he sometimes heard falling gravel as its canopy pushed ever upward, straining against the stones. One day it might break through the ceiling and the cave-in would seal up the monsters’ old world for good.

This was where Frisk had sat, when Chara had said his goodbyes. He’d planted his soul in Asriel’s body like a weed and let his will sprout within him until all that power Asriel usurped was at Chara’s fingertips, but it still hadn’t been enough. He was sure Asriel would have been happy to go to the surface with him in tow, carrying both their souls inside him just like last time, but he wasn’t interested in being a passenger, especially considering their destination. Asriel had been hurt by his decision to leave, that’s just the way he was, but better to get it over with all at once. Leave him be, Chara had thought. You had your chance. Time to rest.

He was only ashamed of the way he’d acted at the moment of his defeat. For all the time they had been together, he’d hated Asriel’s constant crying – he always looked like he was on the verge of tears anyway, and would start to well up and sniffle at the slightest reason, or sometimes for no reason at all. Sometimes he’d cry just because he was afraid of crying. The sound of it, the constant anticipation of it, and worst of all, seeing his parents rush to comfort him every time it happened – all of it had twisted Chara inside, for some reason, and he’d tried everything short of physical violence to make him stop. Insults, belittling, cold silence, taking his toys, locking him out of his room. Kindness definitely wasn’t helping him, he’d reasoned, so maybe something a little more practical was called for. True, Chara himself had cried once, when he’d first fallen down, but that was different. He’d been in a lot of pain. And it wasn’t like he’d made a habit out of it.

And yet, in this cave, when the last of his strength had run out and Frisk still, hatefully, impossibly, refused to hurt him, he’d cried. “Bawled” would be more accurate. “Hysterics” would not be unfair. Worst of all, it had been in Asriel’s voice, and he was positive that Asriel himself had never wailed the way Chara had back then. Chara’s ears burned with embarrassment at the thought of it, even now. He would’ve liked to write it off as stress – it had been a very long, difficult day, all things considered – but at this point, with no one left to judge, he had to admit the real reason. Seven human souls, every monster soul, and Asriel’s own lingering essence had been contained in his stolen body, and even then, not a single one of them had called his name. Even Asriel had fallen silent. He’d been full to bursting with the hearts and minds of everyone he’d ever known, and he’d still been alone. The way he was before, the way he was now.

Chara’s eyes stung. He wiped at them and was horrified to see his fingers come away wet.

“No,” he said, and rubbed his face with his sleeve until his skin felt scalded. “Don’t you dare. You don’t get to do this now.”

He lowered his arm and sniffed. The roots underneath his splayed legs seemed to twitch. He thought he felt one rub his ankle sympathetically and he jerked himself away.

“I don’t need pity from _you,_ ” he snapped. Then he realized what he’d just done, and groaned, and buried his face in his hands.

Outside, the wind picked up again. The cave mouth whistled like a greeting and the leaves overhead all shuddered. Chara crossed his legs, balled himself up against the gust. Fresh snowflakes drifted in like motes of pollen and settled down pale on the stones, but he didn’t see any of it. He kept his hands over his eyes and waited for the noise to end.

“Suck it up,” he said, voice muffled against his palms. “You’re not supposed to be here at all.”

*   *   *

Here was a classroom, the chalkboard wiped bare.

The streets of New Home were easy enough to navigate, but once you stepped inside one of these buildings, all bets were off – apparently, the monsters hadn’t cared too much about civic planning, and the buildings could house apartments or shops or, yes, schools, all of it crowded so close together it was sometimes difficult to tell which was which. This classroom was low-ceilinged, makeshift, its smooth stone walls papered with roughly crayoned drawings of flowers, the city, King Asgore (quite a few of the latter, sometimes in different outfits). The furniture was a motley, mismatched heap of whatever the monsters had pulled out of the trash – there were some proper school desks, in a variety of sizes, but there were also rough-cut tables and splintery benches and a few pieces that seemed to be discarded lawn furniture. There were a few small bookshelves off to one corner. Chara knelt in front of them, bathed in the glow of his lantern. One of Gyftrot’s old satchels lay crumpled beside him.

“No, no…filled out already…this one’s in French or something, and this is…algebra? God, no, put it back, don’t even think about it…”

He flipped through scribbled-in vocabulary primers with pages wrinkled as wadded-up tissue, his face small and pinched in the lamplight. He’d already gone through most of the textbooks Gyftrot had brought him when he was still living in the Snowed Inn, but he didn’t feel like he’d learned much. After years without anything to read besides the plaques in Waterfall (and he’d spent entirely too much time there, drifting from one part of the monsters’ history to the next, cursing every word of it for giving him the first inklings of the plan that would leave him in such a sorry state) he was able to at least fumble his way through most words, and his handwriting was better than the palsied scrawl it had been when he was still trying to remember how his fingers worked, but he still wasn’t much of a tutor. Science put him to sleep, the monsters’ history textbooks were both difficult and perilously unreliable, and his mathematics in particular were horrible. He didn’t seem to have any grasp of numbers anymore.

At last he shoved a few workbooks into the satchel, slung it around his shoulder, and stood up. He placed his lantern on the teacher’s desk (wobbly, gouged, its underside black with mold) so it gave adequate light to the whole room. Then he got to work.

The desks were sitting in a rough cluster at the center of the room. Working carefully, Chara dragged them out into orderly lines and rows, making allowances for their different sizes. Many of them had surfaces full of doodles or notes; at the corner of one desk was a drawing of what was either Mettaton or a very sparkly calculator. The desk-legs scraping across the floor echoed as if it was the only sound in the whole capital, which Chara guessed was probably true.

When he was done he stepped back, surveyed his work, called it good. Then he took up his lantern and left the room, soundlessly shutting the door behind him.

From a distance New Home looked like a normal city, if a little antiquated, its sharp-edged parapets and unadorned boxy buildings holding a Gothic tinge. But up close you’d see there were no seams in the stone that made up each building, no suggestion that bricks had been laid or mortar spread to hold all these structures together – it was as if they’d sprouted right up from the ground, whole and hollow, ready to be filled by the trash the humans left behind. Fungus crawled along walls and down alleys, printing abstract graffiti in vivid, toxic colors – radiation green, sky blue, royal purple. Chara drifted down the streets aimless as a vagrant, with only the glittering castle in the distance to mark where he was and where he’d been. His lantern swung back and forth in his hand, jingling like a pocketful of change.

He stopped into abandoned apartments and picked over what was left on their tables or in their cabinets, eating whatever looked appetizing, with special attention paid to the sweets – monster food didn’t spoil, or go stale, or attract flies, and even though it still left him feeling faintly hungry at the end, like he’d consumed something no more substantial than a cloud, he still knew he could keep going for years on their leftovers alone. They still had running water, though it emerged in fits and starts; he slurped it right from the tap, without bothering to use a cup. He curled up in beds of a dozen different kinds, from bunk to cot to canopy. And everywhere he went, he cleaned up after himself. Shelves were dusted, covers straightened, toys picked up off the floor. Aside from the dirt of his footprints, he left every home looking better than when he’d found it.

He hadn’t been this much of a neat freak before; he’d left little clutter in the Dreemurr household, true, but that was mostly because he’d wanted to make as little impression of himself in the place as possible. It hadn’t been his home, even if the monsters had believed otherwise. But now he didn’t feel comfortable leaving anywhere until it was spick and span. On some level he enjoyed it – being able to leave his mark, proof that he was there, his hands able to alter the world around him again – but mostly he did it because of a feeling he couldn’t shake. Call it a premonition. That, one day, the monsters would return, beaten and demoralized by the surface world again. He thought they should at least have clean homes when that happened.

“And then you wouldn’t be the only one down here anymore,” he muttered. His lantern jostled at his side and set his shadow dancing. “You’re pathetic.”

He was talking to himself more often, too.

Here was a doorway aclog with more tree roots. He was convinced the tree was playing games with him, now. He sometimes heard the creak of new wood in the echo of his footsteps. In Waterfall new growth had formed across the marshes, so that he conveniently no longer had to get his feet muddy when crossing the area. And recently he’d stumbled across a root, kicked at it in frustration, and then stepped forward and fallen flat on his face after tripping over another root that, he would swear, had not been there a second ago.

“You need to slow down,” he said to the doorway. “It’s going to be crowded enough already without you growing everywhere.”

The tree, being a tree, gave no indication that it had heard. He rolled his eyes and stalked down the empty streets, the buildings looming over him like sentinels.

“That’s assuming they don’t just kill everyone,” he said. “Locking them up didn’t work, so try something more permanent…no, Frisk would reset if it came to that. Wouldn’t he?” he asked, turning to a root-knotted window. “Maybe not all the way back, but…well, you’d know if that happened anyway. You and Asriel would be right back where you started.” He shook his head. “At least Asriel wouldn’t remember anything. No. Stop thinking about it. Go to Hotland and jump into the lava if you’re in such a hurry.”

He didn’t know how much time had already passed down here – Christmas had probably already come and gone (he still remembered the first one he’d spent down here, King Asgore in that ridiculous red suit; it was one of the only times his smile had actually felt genuine, though that had been more because of the shock than anything, the King of Monsters decked out in velour head to toe with a giant sack over his shoulder and a little hat perched neatly between his horns), but the wind outside still blew bitter. He kept telling himself that measuring time was pointless; he wasn’t going anywhere, he was down here for the long haul.

He lived aimlessly, one heartbeat to the next. He could have erased himself again in any number of ways – there was Hotland’s lava, high falls, more flowers to eat if he felt unoriginal – but he was tired of dying. Worse, he no longer knew if he had any idea how to do it properly. He’d had three chances so far, more than most people got, and he’d screwed up every one.

When he’d first climbed Mt. Ebott, he’d thought of it as just taking a walk. To keep on moving until he stopped. The walk had gone on for much too long, but the principle remained the same. His footsteps echoed through the silent city, his lantern a single point bobbing wisplike down the streets. He would take one step after another, until he reached the end.

*   *   *

Here were the woods, darkened and far below.

He stood at the edge of Snowdin’s cliffs, hands in his pockets, flanked by his lantern and satchel. Both of them already bore a light fur of snow. The drifts were getting deep enough to bear his weight when he crossed.

The evergreens in this part of the Underground stood as they always had, indomitable as Frisk’s great tree – and it seemed that they all held some kind of truce, because those heaving roots largely avoided the forests off Snowdin’s footpaths. Back when he still walked through here regularly, Chara would often wonder what he might find if he turned off the path and headed into those woods, pressing onward until the crosshatched green covered him up completely. He never went in, though. He had the feeling that, if he chose to walk into that uncharted dark, he wouldn’t come out again.

He’d come here now because he’d wanted a change of scenery, someplace with its own light – he was getting sick of having to walk and sleep and read by that burnt orange lamplight day in and day out. Snowdin’s unseen glow, reflected thousandfold by the snowfall, was almost blinding after his time in the capital. He could make out the individual burrs on the evergreens below, all of them sharp as fangs.

He was lit up, as well, and not to his benefit. Time had continued its work on him and he’d dealt with it carelessly, irritably – his hair had grown until it started to blind him and he’d scrounged up scissors and chopped away the offending locks without bothering to use a mirror; one of his teeth had grown looser and looser until one day he’d felt it come unmoored from his gums and then turned and spat it into the gutter and walked off, idly tonguing the empty socket; the clothes he’d died in were filthy and frayed, and starting to feel a little too small. His face was scraped from the occasional fall and his hands were nicked and scarred from gardening mishaps. His skin was colorless as milk.

The wind blew and he clutched himself and shivered. His teeth chattered like castanets.

“Oh me, oh my. Are you all right?”

A voice behind him, bright and bubbly. It was the snowman. Chara ignored it. He could have picked any cliff in Snowdin to visit if he wanted to take in the view. It was just a coincidence that he’d picked the one with the snowman on it. It didn’t mean anything at all.

“I will admit that I’m not the best judge, but you don’t seem dressed for this weather,” it continued. “Perhaps bring a nice overcoat the next time you visit.”

“I’m not here to keep you company,” Chara said, without turning around.

“Then I suppose I’m here to keep you company.” Chara felt heat rise in his cheeks. “I don’t mind. The Underground has gone empty, after all. It’s a pleasure to hear another voice. Even if it doesn’t speak very often.”

He didn’t dignify that with a reply.

“Would you answer a question?” said the snowman.

“Fine.”

“Is there truly no one else left underground? Everyone has left for the surface?”

“Yes.”

“That’s good,” it said. “When I saw you, I feared that others would follow. It would be terrible if something happened to drive them all back down here.”

“It still might happen.” His fists clenched inside his pockets. “I think it will.”

“Is that why you’ve stayed?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere else to go.”

“Oh my. How sad.” The snowman went silent for a moment, then its voice brightened again. “You should still give it a try, I think. Monsters are quite hospitable to strangers. And humans cannot be so bad, either. The one who fell down here was very kind.” Chara rolled his eyes. “I met him when he first came to these woods, and asked him to-”

“I know what you did.” Frisk had taken the lump of snowman to the surface on every one of his resets, without fail. It was just one of many things he’d done that Chara had found totally inexplicable.

“Oh! So you must be acquainted with the human, then. You see? Someone out there is waiting for you, after all.”

“He’s not waiting for me.” Chara’s shoulders hunched; his voice became stumbling, slightly embarrassed. “I mean, there’s always…there’s someone else who might be. But I don’t think so.” He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter. I don’t belong up there.”

“Of course you don’t,” the snowman replied, and Chara’s head snapped around, glaring. “Very few people really belong anywhere. But that just means they can go everywhere. Do you understand?”

Chara stayed where he was for a moment. Then, slowly, he slogged back through the snow until he was face to face with the snowman. It wasn’t very well-built – the petrified raisins that made up its mouth didn’t form a smile, just a neutral straight line, and its eyes were slightly askew. He glowered at it as if expecting it to blink.

“What are you, anyway?” he asked.

“I am a snowman.”

“Are you a monster?”

“Perhaps. But I am also a snowman.”

“My point is,” he said, “if I left, you really would be all by yourself down here. Would you be okay with that? You can’t even move.”

“Well, I never could. Unlike most people, I do belong here.” Its voice remained cheery and casual. “The piece of myself that made it to the surface was more than I could have hoped for. Knowing that everyone else is happy is enough for me. Is it enough for you?”

Chara averted his gaze, bit his lip. “It should be.”

“You said before that you didn’t think all was well up there. If you need a change in scenery, why not go and see for yourself? There can’t be any harm in it.”

Chara said nothing.

“And,” the snowman added coyly, “it may just be my imagination, but I have the strangest feeling that the weather out there has changed lately. Surely it would be more agreeable to you now.”

Chara’s fists were bunched at his sides, clenched so tight his nails cut into his palms. His eyes flicked back up to the snowman’s two dots of coal.

He asked, “You really don’t need anything else?”

 “To be honest,” the snowman answered, “I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s behind me for a change. The view must be spectacular, considering how long you’ve stood there staring at it. But other than that, I have no complaints.”

He stared a moment longer. Then, without another word, he walked off, grabbed his things from the cliff’s edge, and returned the way he came. He didn’t look at the snowman again as he passed, but he still heard its voice echo after him.

“Goodbye!” it called. “Keep warm.”

*   *   *

Here was an argument.

“What’s the matter with you? You were on your own for who knows how long, but now you’re already getting cold feet? Sure, now you’ve actually _got_ feet again, but that doesn’t matter. You’re supposed to be better than this.”

He was in another New Home apartment, whose former resident had evidently been something of a shutterbug – the walls were crazed with picture frames, all of them emptied out, and the hanging squares of glass took his lantern’s gleam and made the place shine like the inside of a star. Whoever it was, Chara hoped for their sake that they also had very tough skin, because the bed he was sitting on had a mattress so old and rickety that its springs jabbed at him like fingernails. Spread open before him was another textbook. The subject at hand appeared to be long division. It might as well have been in hieroglyphics.

“You don’t even have a place to stay out there,” he muttered. “You seriously think they’ll just take you back in after what you did? You saw what they all went through. All of that falls on _you_. They’ll probably be glad to have a scapegoat after all this time.” He pressed his knuckles to his forehead. “No, no, Frisk’ll cover for you, he always does. And Asriel will probably try to take the blame himself, the idiot. You can’t let him do that. But you won’t anyway, because you’re staying _here._ ”

He threw himself back and fell spread eagle on the bed, eyes wide and staring at nothing. The springs squealed in indignation.

“There are humans out there.” Now he was patrolling the streets, filling his satchel with potato chips, sweet rolls, Sea Tea. He filled bottles with water from the ever-less reliable taps and slotted them neatly inside. “You know how they are. You know what they’ll do. Oh, will you get _over_ yourself?” he snapped, teeth bared at nothing. “When are you finally going to let it go? Was Frisk not enough? Even the ones who killed Asriel only did it because of _you!_ ”

“What about that skeleton, huh?” he said, now in Waterfall, splashing his face with its gleaming marshwater. Rivulets of grime ran down his skin. “You know, the one whose brother you killed? What do you think he’ll do once you get back in his sights? You saw what he did to Asriel when he was running amok down here. You’ll never know what hit you.” He gripped the semi-solid mass of his hair with both soaking hands and tried to wring some of the filth out of it. “What, you’re scared of dying now? Maybe if someone _else_ finishes you off then you’ll finally go away for good. Frisk wouldn’t let it happen anyway. He’s got that stupid comedian wrapped around his finger.”

Here was the MTT Hotel, the fountain finally dried up. The floor was full of scratches and scuffs from the mad procession of luggage that had run through here on the way to the surface. In the MTT Burger Emporium, Glamburgers sparkled behind the counter like junk jewelry. Chara hadn’t touched them – he wasn’t a picky eater, especially not now, but he couldn’t stand those burgers. They tasted like something scraped off an arts and crafts table.

He’d gone over the restaurant a long time ago, folding the tablecloths, putting up all the chairs, drawing the stage’s curtains shut. The ficus plants had all withered; there was only one garden he was interested in tending. They quietly moldered as he stood in front of the picture window that took up one whole wall of the restaurant, a sheet of fogged glass overlooking the dormant machinery of Hotlands beyond. The magma’s smoldering glow lay heavy on cogs and conveyors that were already starting to rust and crack from disuse. Chara looked at them, through them, focusing on his reflection in the window.

He was a ghastly sight – hair a crusted frightwig, clothes hanging on by a prayer, eyes pushed so deep into their sockets they were little more than glimmers in twin pools of murk. He looked like something that had just crawled out of the ground, which was appropriate, maybe, but wouldn’t make a good first impression on anybody. He tried to tease apart a few clumps of his chopped-up bangs and only succeeded in getting his fingers stuck. He sighed, lowered his hand.

He said, “He’s happier without you.”

And to that, his reflection had no answer. Because it wasn’t an argument – it was a plain fact.

From the first moment Asriel had picked him up and brought him home from the Ruins, Chara had begun laying his plans. The royal family had taken him in as one of their own and he’d smiled and stayed silent and said the right things when prompted, but behind that smile his eyes had been taking measure of them all, drawing lines, connecting dots – the monsters’ trusting natures, the legends written on Waterfall’s walls, the impassable monolith of the barrier, the great and terrible things a monster could do with a human soul in tow. He’d manipulated them from the start and he’d done a poor job of it. And when Asriel had returned from the surface, dying slowly of his wounds, dust already flaking off him like snow, he’d felt everything Asriel felt, nestled beside his soul – his regret, his grief, and his pathetic hope that they were still friends. And he’d cared about none of it. Asriel had been a tool that had twisted in his hand at the wrong time, that was all. Even when he’d tried to take Asriel back for himself, at the end of the hundred-year winter, he hadn’t wanted a friend. He’d just wanted a way to finally make the cold stop.

“He’s got real friends now.” His reflection’s mouth twitched. “Even if most of them are idiots. But that just means he’ll fit right in.”  
In the far distance, Hotland bubbled and steamed. Chara shut his eyes, pressed his forehead on the cool glass.

“Be honest with yourself for a change. You don’t really want to see him again, right?”

 For a time, the only movement in the restaurant was Chara’s shadow warping like wax on the wall behind him. Then, his hands began to shake. He grit his teeth. Then he reared back and smashed his forehead into the glass once, twice, thrice, hard enough to make the whole window shudder. And when he pulled back, he told himself that his eyes were only watering because of the pain. He stormed out of the restaurant, cursing himself the whole way.

*   *   *

Here was the exit.

He was back at the great tree, facing the cavern’s mouth. His satchel on his shoulder, heavy enough to pull his body lopsided. The air that blew from outside was cool but mild, and carried a hint of fragrance from new buds bursting open. It was dusk and the spreading pool of red-purple light was inches away from his toes. It matched the growing bruise on his forehead.

The leaves overhead rattled.

“I know,” he said. “Don’t rush me.”

He raised his foot and set it down. His shadow grew and leapt behind him as he walked. When he reached the exit’s arch, he hiked his satchel up and glanced behind him at the tree.

“Don’t grow too much,” he said. “I might come back.”

The tree, being a tree, did not respond. But the very outer edge of its leaves bent and swayed, as if shooing him away.

He turned back, and swallowed hard, and stepped outside.

When the sunlight hit the back of his neck he squeezed his eyes shut and bent double as his stomach heaved – all of those rancid memories rising up at once, the pollen’s stink and the blazing sun and the humans’ hateful noise. Then the nausea subsided, bit by bit, and he straightened and looked out at the surface.

The forest below was still mostly bare – these were no evergreens, and their branches had only just started to bud. But the twilight streamed through those branches like reams of silk and lit up the glittering city on the horizon like a fistful of gems, and when he took a breath the air tasted sweeter, less recycled. A light breeze kicked up and teased at his tattered sleeves. He approached the cliff’s edge and saw the end of the mountain path far below, the stretch of disused highway that ran down to civilization. The little town at the end of that road, huddled beneath the city’s shadow.

After a long while, Chara lifted one foot, and dangled it over the cliff’s edge. Then he pulled it back again. He turned and walked down the mountain path, following the trail the monsters had left behind.

One step after another, until he reached the end.

*   *   *

Here was a garden already tainted by weeds, golden petals shot through with green.

Here was the city of monsters. Tidied rooms and abandoned mementos, never to be looked at again.

Here was the Core, the engine at the heart of the Underground. Every light and monitor and twisted metal generator gone silent and dark, the sea of plasma dispersed to nothing more than a swarm of stray motes that massed like fireflies in the abyss.

Here was Waterfall, the marshes receding. The tree roots patiently drank the swamp away, and for the first time since the monsters were forced underground, the perpetual rainfall changed, its drops turned gentle and slow. The statue sat with umbrella in hand; its music box would play until the machinery finally failed.

Here was a snowman, at the edge of a forested cliff. Its head had been carefully rotated around, so that it faced the expanse of woods below. It might have been a trick of the light, but its expression seemed more cheerful than usual.

Here were the Ruins, always open for visitors. The home beyond was immaculately neat; even some old, dirty footprints had been swept away. An unlit hearth, a cold oven, a bedroom door firmly shut.

Here was an empty hall.

Here was a quiet evening.

Here was all that remained. A world at low ebb, fallen vacant and asleep.


	3. The Parents

The town some miles from the foot of Mt. Ebott was sleepy, idyllic and almost insufferably quaint, all squat two-story houses and golden afternoons and lawns in states ranging from “unkempt” (most of the monsters’, whose owners still had little experience with gardening) to “paradisiac” (King Asgore’s, whose owner had entirely too much), but it represented one of the monsters’ first and hardest-won victories after leaving their captivity. The place had been considerably smaller before they’d gotten through with it, and while the humans living there hadn’t immediately run outdoors with weapons and blunt instruments in hand, as they had one disastrous day long ago, they were still reluctant to let an entire civilization settle in their backyard. After much explaining and apologizing and the happy revelation that monsters used actual gold pieces as their currency, Asgore – who had a cannier administrative mind than most people gave him credit for, especially when the entirety of his kingdom was on speed-dial to advise him – had purchased a large swathe of the undeveloped land neighboring the town, choosing to erect yet another home from scratch. He’d called it Newer Home. No one was surprised.

The monsters had built with the same speed and efficiency they’d used to construct New Home (anyone trying to dismantle these houses would find, as Chara had, that they were mostly in one solid piece, with few nails or rivets to hold the structure together, and many human construction firms were equal parts unsettled and excited at the possibilities there), and before long there’d been two towns, one sizably larger than the other, joined by a single road. The communities had been strictly separated. But it seemed the monsters’ unrelentingly affable attitudes, made even more pleasant by their elation at being on the surface, eventually won the humans’ curiosity if not their trust. The towns grew closer together, new houses being built, that central road growing and splitting off like a root bed, until it became quite difficult to tell where one neighborhood started and the other began. Meanwhile, the monsters themselves also began to branch out. Handfuls of them moved to try their luck in the city, Alphys and Undyne included. Papyrus and Sans took a lengthy road trip that inadvertently turned into a whirlwind ambassadorial tour. Mettaton set off to wreak a campaign of unbridled terror on humanity’s unsuspecting entertainment industry.

But the Dreemurrs, and Toriel, stayed behind. And Toriel’s schoolhouse, much like Toriel herself, wasn’t nearly as innocuous as its unassuming appearance suggested. It was made of simple brown stone, three stories, with a sizable yard for recess. Asgore acted as its part-time groundskeeper (meaning that it won so many beautification awards that Toriel started to politely withdraw from such contests out of courtesy to others) and had, with his unerring etymological acumen, christened it “School.”

Its student body at the beginning mostly consisted of the younger monster population, plus Frisk, and the more experienced monster teachers, plus Toriel. But eventually, cautiously, some humans began to enroll their children too, if only for convenience’s sake, and these children became the quiet focus of very close scrutiny from Toriel as she watched how they interacted with her students. Children were proxies to an extent, she knew; they drew their attitudes from their parents, and their treatment of monsters would be a strong indicator of how much trouble her people could expect as they tried to re-enter a world that had largely forgotten them.

It had gone well. Better than anticipated, even. Most of the human students shrugged off the fact that they were sharing classes with creatures that wouldn’t look out of place in their morning cartoons, and when asked by their parents about how school was going, casually said it wasn’t much different than any other school, except maybe a little smaller. It helped that all the children, human and monster, were united in dread of Toriel herself, who, despite her sweet, tolerant, and nurturing personality, was an absolutely merciless educator. She would happily tutor anyone after hours and her markings on homework and tests were detailed and neat, but she could not be bribed or flattered or reasoned with and the only thing she graded on a curve was penmanship, out of deference to some of her more alternatively-limbed students. Not even her own children were exempt – Frisk and Asriel had taken a covert trip to hike Mt. Ebott just when the leaves had started to turn, and as punishment she had assigned them double homework, possibly until the end of recorded time. It went a long way towards disarming any accusations of favoritism, at least.

That was Toriel’s school, a place meant for the monsters to learn about humans just as the students learned from their teachers. The monsters’ former Queen used the student bodies’ relationship as a symbol for that of humans and monsters in general. And as time went on, and the school’s reputation did not falter, her people and theirs seemed to be reaching an understanding. She was getting applications to fill more faculty positions. Some of them were even from human teachers.

She was in her own classroom now, the place cozy, wood-paneled, drenched in soft light from the ranked windows in the back. The desks arranged in neat parallel and the markerboards still bearing the ghosts of arithmetic problems from her most recent lesson. It was just her right now; the children had gone out to recess, and if she listened hard she could hear them at play outside. It was always a pleasant, relaxing sound, provided she never made out any of the things they shouted. A cold cup of tea sat forgotten at her elbow as she graded papers, marking spelling errors in red, drawing little horned smiley faces for exceptional work.

Toriel had been in exile the same as everyone else, and even though she had memories of the surface before the war she still needed a fair bit of education herself. She had years of missed history to catch up on and no formal experience with teaching, and rated herself just as harshly as she rated her students. And she was proud of her students, by and large. Frisk’s grades in particular had started out middling, but gained steadily over time – she was pleased with that, she hadn’t known his level of schooling before enrollment so all of his successes or failures were mostly on her – and he was now almost near the top of his class.

Asriel, on the other hand, was something of a unique case. She frowned as she counted up the errors on his homework and found that, once again, it dropped him exactly in middle of the “B” range. Thanks to his unusual experiences underground, where reading every book he could find was one of the first things he’d done to stave off his endless boredom, Asriel was ready for high school at the very least, but instead he just precisely calculated the mistakes he’d need to make to stay safely mediocre compared to everyone else. Toriel understood, to an extent – he was already shy, he didn’t need his classmates taunting him over getting top marks from his mother – but that level of manipulation wasn’t natural for someone his age. It kept reminding her that, despite everything, her son wasn’t quite the same as he’d been before.

She sighed and set his paper aside. It couldn’t be helped. At least he wasn’t visibly bored in class, no watching the clock or daydreaming when she taught. The only really objectionable thing he did was constantly doodle out stars on his desk. Its laminated tan surface was covered in graphite constellations.

Toriel kept at her work, humming tunelessly, the clock over the classroom door marking off the seconds. Then, a floorboard creaked in the dusty silence. She looked up and saw that the classroom door was ajar. She hadn’t even heard it open.

She adjusted her spectacles and began to stand up, pen in hand. It was only then she noticed the green and gold figure in the center of the classroom, beside Asriel’s desk.

“Asriel?” Her chair scraped across the floor as she rose. “Did you forget something? Class does not start again for another-”

Her words stopped, mouth hanging open uselessly.

Even then, she still thought it was Asriel for a moment, just that he’d been in some terrible accident. Layers of dirt had stained his clothes the color of rot, and flashes of white grinned through rips and frays in the fabric. But then her mind assembled the other pieces, the brown hair darkened and slick with grease, the skin drawn so tight across bone that it looked ready to split. He ran his fingers over Asriel’s doodles; she saw crescents of scarflesh on his hands. And his face, though unsmiling and covered with smudges and scrapes, was still recognizable.

Chara glanced at her out the corner of his eye, and then turned to the windows. The childrens’ voices, cheerful and oblivious, drifted in.

“I, um.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t know where you lived.”

She didn’t answer. But after a moment, there was a clatter as her pen slipped from her fingers and struck her desk. It rolled across the surface, loud as a drumroll in the silence, and, with one last burst of fanfare, fell to the ground.

*   *   *

It was times like these that Asgore regretted never getting a proper office.

The King of Monsters lived in a humble single-story home with only a handful of noteworthy qualities – its front lawn was almost offensively verdant, its flower beds resembled a magic eye picture that had partially exploded, and the house itself had all its doorways and furniture built half again as large as normal, owing to its owner’s eight-foot height without counting the horns. This was to ensure he wasn’t constantly gouging doorframes and puncturing ceilings while going through his daily routine, and while it meant that Frisk and Asriel felt a bit like mountaineers whenever they came to visit, it seemed to work out well enough.

His kitchen table, too, was larger than usual, sturdy enough to bear the weight of several adult humans. And yet it still groaned under the mass of books and paperwork piled high upon it now. There was barely any room for Asgore to rest his tea. Alphys had told him that he could at least cut down on the mess with a computer, but he was still a little behind on the idea, not to mention the fact that his palms alone were the size of the average keyboard.

He took off his reading glasses, rubbed his eyes, and gazed longingly out the large picture window beside the table. His garden never looked more inviting than at times like these.

The thing about monsters was, they didn’t require much in the way of government. They were eccentric but easygoing, they kept to their own affairs, they knew to pay their taxes, and they seldom committed any crimes due to the very real possibility of Undyne personally tracking them down and punching them in the face. But despite all of that, and despite their surprisingly smooth integration into the surface world so far, the flow of paper was unrelenting. This little town was a fine start, but it could hardly accommodate all monsters by itself – there were aquatic monsters and spectral monsters and monsters which were permanently aflame, and all of them needed special consideration, all of them needed to go through the proper channels. Living space was constantly being challenged and re-negotiated. Amidst the plateaus on his kitchen table were polite municipal challenges, taxation notices, books of zoning law. The paperwork was sporadic, it came and went in waves, but sometimes Asgore felt as though his past years of relatively effort-free ruling (though he’d certainly had concerns of his own back then, as well) were being avenged all at once. Bureaucracy was a hungry beast, and never sated for long.

Still, he couldn’t grumble too much; everyone else was pulling their weight right alongside him. There was Toriel and her school, of course, but on the more official end of human-monster relations, Papyrus had turned out to be a stunningly effective ambassador. The way Asgore understood it, human diplomats mostly existed in a purgatory of forced smiles, stale conversation, and tiny unappetizing sandwiches. They weren’t prepared for Papyrus’ unrelenting friendliness and straightforward, if high-decibel, turn of phrase. It confused them. He was naïve and self-centered but he was also disarming and encouraging and apparently immune to fatigue, and gradually he’d won human officials over to the point where he was in danger of being double-booked on diplomatic conferences. And as Papyrus socialized, Sans dealt with the administrative end, methodically working his way through the same bureaucracy that currently beguiled Asgore – and he also quietly stood back and watched his brother chat, and made note of any humans who appeared to be laughing at Papyrus, rather than laughing with him. Some humans wanted to take advantage of monsters, that was to be expected, but Papyrus’ charm and Sans’ observations meant that any deviousness was being nipped in the bud, for now.

Then there were regular reports from Alphys, who’d apparently tripped and fallen into a social life of her own. Humans had lost touch with magic over the years, but that stood to change with monsters back on the scene, and Alphys, willingly or not, had found herself at the forefront. The whole Amalgamate situation aside, there wasn’t anyone better at merging metal and magic – Asgore understood that Sans dabbled in the sciences as well, but when he’d reached out to him, Sans had dismissively said he was more on the theoretical end of things – and her user-friendly blueprints and considerable engineering experience had meant she was getting cautious outreach from human researchers left and right. She needed regular assurance from Undyne to keep from passing out during presentations and she still hadn’t lost that stutter, but Asgore made it clear that she was doing their kind proud.

As for Undyne, her mere presence was enough to drive monsterkind’s potential crime rate down to nil, and she’d been left with time on her hands. At the moment she was amusing herself by working with Mettaton, who’d struck the human world like a meteorite, with about as much collateral damage. As it turned out, being the sole film, television, theater, musical, pantomime, and interpretive dance star for an entire new demographic of consumers gave one a lot of leeway during network negotiations. Undyne now had a cooking show on his programming block, and while it was less than useless at teaching anyone how to cook, her bare-knuckle approach was tremendously popular with children of all ages. Mettaton said they were going to start merchandising if her ratings kept up this pace.

Asgore realized he’d been staring at the same sheet of paper for the last three minutes. He blinked hard and tried to make out what it was but the words skittered away to the corners of his vision like ants. He groaned and put it down.

Trying to work right now was futile, at any rate. Not long ago he’d gotten a call from Toriel asking if he was home, and then asking if she could come over. And she’d sounded on the verge of panic.

Asgore had made his peace with their separation; some things you just couldn’t fix. If a pot fell and smashed to the ground, you could go through the pain and tedium of scraping up and gluing together every last shard, but even if you found them all and arranged them back into their old shape you’d still never be able to look past the cracks. Better to just sweep the wreckage aside and move on. He’d been happy to keep his distance from her, looking forward to bi-weekly visits from the children, so he’d been mildly shocked when Toriel herself had gotten in touch one snowy evening a couple months back and said it wasn’t enough. Maintaining these strict lines of engagement like they were two nations at war wasn’t fair to Frisk and Asriel, she’d said, and it wasn’t fair to them, either. She’d expanded his visitation times and insisted he start coming to dinner every now and then. She’d been very formal about it. She’d drawn up a rota and everything.

Still, it was unusual for her to call him out of the blue, especially during her work hours. And her tone worried him. Toriel was fretful, but kept an iron grip on her emotions. A little anxiety in her voice meant a whole storm was brewing in her head.

_(Knock, knock, knock.)_

And there she was.

He took off his glasses and tossed them onto a wayward stack, then stood and lurched his way to the front door. He’d been sitting down for the last three or four hours and his knees were jelly.

He opened the door to see Toriel standing with her palms folded and her mouth a neutral line. Her eyes were slightly red-rimmed, so faint that he wouldn’t even notice if he hadn’t been looking for it.

“Howdy, Toriel,” he said. “Everything all right?”

“Good afternoon, Asgore. I’m sorry if I sounded a bit frantic on the phone, I thought you’d be at the school for some reason but couldn’t find-”

“No, no, I understand. The work caught up with me, you know how it is.” He gestured vaguely at the unseen topography on his kitchen table. “What can I do for you? Did something happen during class?”

She opened her mouth for a moment, then closed it again, and that was when Asgore felt actual dread brush at his spine. A nervous Toriel was rare; a speechless one was unprecedented.

“Toriel,” he said slowly. “Are the children all right?”

She seemed to find that funny; the edge of her mouth jerked up, then relaxed. The fingers of her clasped hands couldn’t stay still either, they prodded at each other like questing animals.

“They’re fine,” she said. “I was doing some grading during recess, they’d all gone out to play, when…well…” She glanced behind her, then back at Asgore. “I had a visitor.”

She stepped aside. And Asgore saw who’d been hiding behind her.

He remembered Chara’s smile more than anything else about him, and not as fondly as he would have liked. The child had always been somewhat distant with everyone except Asriel, quiet, often speaking only when spoken to, but his smile was ever-present and his eyes seemed to sparkle with an anticipation that Asgore had chosen to believe was hopeful. But there had been something wrong. The smile had been too rigid, and faltered at the wrong times – when Asgore and Toriel spoke to him fondly or tucked him into bed or gave him gifts, especially the lockets that he and Asriel had shared, his expression would sometimes tremble as if a vital screw had slipped loose before re-asserting itself, skin stiff and dimpled as plastic. Though it shamed Asgore to admit it, he’d started to find it unnerving towards the end.

That smile was gone now. Chara stood in his ruined clothes, taller than Asgore remembered, shoulders hunched, fists clenched at his sides. Knees skinned, face marred by minor wounds and smears of dirt, and a huge bruise splashed like a sunset beneath his mangled bangs. And his expression had inverted into a scowl, angry and somehow defiant, so that with his stiff limbs and hunched shoulders it looked as though he was expecting Asgore to strike him.

Asgore stared for a moment, and his breath acquired a queer, whistling pitch. He gripped the edge of the doorframe; his gaze turned hazy and dim.

“Asgore,” Toriel said. “If you faint, then I will be extremely unhappy.”

That seemed to wake him up. He blinked once, twice, and his eyes focused again. He straightened. He looked again at Chara. Chara glared and said nothing.

The floorboards creaked as Asgore turned back into the house.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” he said hoarsely.

Toriel watched him go, then stepped over the threshold. She turned back and offered Chara her hand. Chara glanced at it, then slunk past her and went inside, leaving her to sigh and shut the door and stop for a moment when she saw the state of Asgore’s kitchen.

“Just clear a space somewhere, I’m still a bit disorganized.” he said. He’d already fetched a random assortment of tea leaves and the kettle; it clunked like a stone as he set it on the burner. “Do Frisk and Asriel know?”

“Chara wanted to see you first. He was…insistent.” She pulled out a chair, sat down, and watched as Chara stalked around the table and sat on the opposite side. His back was to the picture window and the way the sunlight struck him turned him photo-negative, like a hole cut into space. He wouldn’t take his eyes off them.

“I asked Sans to fill in for the rest of the day,” she continued, meeting Chara’s stare. “He doesn’t know, either. But he seemed happy enough to help.”

“I imagine he’ll just give everyone three hours of study hall. They’ll be fine for the afternoon.” He lit the flame beneath the kettle. “Milk and sugar?”

“No, thank you.”

“Chara, would you like-”

“I don’t want any,” Chara said.

His voice was hushed and monotone, but spread through the room like ink in water. Asgore and Toriel exchanged a glance, and then stayed quiet until the tea came to boil. Asgore filled their mugs, carried them to the table, set them down, and pulled up a chair. The fragrant steam rose and veiled their faces.

The three of them sat around Asgore’s paperwork like mourners.

“You’re not surprised,” Chara said suddenly.

“We talked about something like this,” Asgore said. “Once or twice. If Asriel returned, then we believed there was always the possibility that…well. Here you are.”

“Not what you expected?”

The two of them didn’t reply.

“It was probably Asriel’s fault,” Chara said. “In case you’re wondering. Something happened when he broke the barrier. I don’t think he did it on purpose.”

“I’m certain he’ll be happy to see you again,” Toriel said. She gripped her mug delicate as an egg.

“Yeah. I bet.” Those deep-set exhausted eyes flicked back and forth between them. “But it doesn’t look like you are.”

Asgore started to answer and then stopped. Because the smile was back, curling out of Chara’s face like a worm. He folded his scarred hands on the table.

“I’m guessing that you found out why we died? Asriel couldn’t have held that little secret in for very long.” His smile widened. “It was my idea, you know. In case he tried to say otherwise. He was just along for the ride. So I don’t blame you for feeling the way you do. It must be hard. Finding out the kind of person that your son really brought home.”

Asgore’s hands began to shake – slightly, though that was still enough to make the whole table rumble – but Toriel lightly touched his wrist, and they stilled again.

“He did tell us,” she said, measured and calm. “As much as he could bear to, anyway. We understood well enough what had happened on that day.” She glanced at Asgore, and he nodded. “The two of us discussed that, as well. What, exactly, we would say to you if you ever did come back into our lives.”

His upper lip curled back, flashing small teeth. “And what’s that?”

“I’m sorry,” Toriel said.

Chara’s expression froze.

“We both are,” Asgore added.

His smile was still there, but the rest of his face seemed to retreat from it. He leaned back, his gaze darting between the two of them, looking for insincerity, finding none. “…what?”

“When we.” Toriel’s breath hitched, but she inhaled deeply and went on. “When we first took you into our home, we accepted our role as your parents. We told ourselves that we were responsible for you – your future, your well-being. We truly thought we’d given you everything you needed to be happy. But we never even asked if that was what you wanted. Foolishly, the two of us assumed you would be satisfied with a life down there. That you would enjoy your time with us as much as we did with you. Asgore and I…knowing what we do now, it’s clear we were blind to how you really felt.” Her voice shook. “And for you to do what you did…for us to be ignorant of that much _pain…_ ”

“It doesn’t matter why or how you came back,” Asgore said, as Toriel tried to regain her composure. “You’re here now. And while we’re grateful that you sought us out, we understand if you want nothing more to do with us after this. We made ourselves your guardians and then we failed you. Even if Asriel disagrees, the fact is that everything that happened on that day falls on us.”

“No.”

They both looked up at that and almost recoiled at what they saw. Chara’s smile had turned rictus, the rest of his face twitching and writhing around it like it was trying to tear itself away from his mouth. His folded hands had clenched so tight that his jagged, chewed-up nails carved raw red lines into his skin.

“No,” he said again. “You are not doing this. I refuse to sit here and listen to you moan about how everything I did was _your_ fault.”

“Chara,” Toriel said, “we are only trying to explain that-”

“Shut up.”

Asgore said, “Your mother just wants to-”

He sprang up on his chair and there was a cannon-fusillade of commotion as he lashed his hands across the table and sent all of Asgore’s paperwork flying, notes and letters and leatherbound books smashing into the tiled floor, papering half the kitchen as they slipped and scattered over one another. Asgore reached out and covered their mugs so they wouldn’t get swept up in their debris; he caught a brief glimpse of what looked like fan-mail and then the paper blew past and there was Chara, standing on top of his chair, arms raised high. He slammed his palms on the emptied tabletop and leaned forward, that ghoulish mask of a smile a tilted crescent beneath burning, feverish eyes.

He said, “Are you listening?”

They both nodded mutely.

“Good,” he said, through grit teeth. “Because I want to make one thing clear. This is exactly why I’m not sorry for what I did. You finally meet the person who killed your son and almost broke your whole kingdom and you start to cry into your stupid little teacups and tell him it’s _your_ fault, and you seriously think you can survive _here?_ I’m glad I killed Asriel!” His voice began to splinter. _“_ He’s never going to last up here anyway!”

“Chara.” Toriel raised her hands. “Please, try to calm down-”

“I was just one human!” Now his voice rose and cracked, squirming the same as his face; it seemed like every part of him was trying to escape from itself. “All alone! I barely even knew what I was doing! But I still fooled you, I used all of you from the start, and you never thought for a second if maybe I didn’t fall down that mountain to spend the rest of my life playing house with you and your idiot kid. The only reason I failed is because he turned out to be just as useless as the rest of you. And you still haven’t learned your lesson, you still think that being _nice_ is enough to survive out here. You don’t stand a chance in this world.” His chest jerked suddenly, and he looked down; when he spoke again, he sounded like he was struggling not to choke. “Not in a world full of people like me.”

His shoulders shook. Though his face was hidden from them, they saw his cheeks smooth out as his smile finally collapsed.

“This was a mistake,” he said. “I never should have come here.” He jumped off the chair and made for the exit. “I need to go, I need-”

Asgore moved with impressive speed for his size – one moment he was seated, and then the chair was rocking on its back legs and he was in the kitchen’s entryway, a solid wall between Chara and the front door. A few of the papers on the floor flew up and away like startled birds.

Chara stood in Asgore’s shadow, arms limp. His knuckles cracked.

“You’re in my way,” he said.

He might have been remarking on the weather, his tone was so casual.

“Chara,” Toriel said. “Please come back and sit down.”

“I said, you’re in my way.”

“Chara, listen to your mother,” Asgore said.

“You are _not_ my parents.”

“Yes,” Asgore said quietly, “we are. Even if we weren’t very good at it.”

“Whether you want it to stay that way is up to you,” Toriel added. “But, here and now, we are responsible for you. And after all that happened, I don’t think either of us can let you go out on your own. Not until we know that you have somewhere safe to go.”

Chara’s head bent until his chin touched his chest. A flush climbed out of his collar and marched across his pale skin.

Asgore reached out a hand to him. After that, things happened very fast.

When Asgore’s palm brushed the top of his head Chara made a guttural noise deep in his throat, something feral and canine, and swung out a fist; he looked so tired and his limbs were so thin that he seemed more likely to hurt himself than anything but his knuckles struck Asgore’s leg with a wet _crunch_ and Asgore dropped soundlessly to one knee with his eyes wide and vacant like someone had flipped an Off switch on his back. Toriel’s chair slashed scuffmarks across the floor as she jumped to her feet and cried Asgore’s name, but her voice was quickly overwhelmed by Chara’s, Chara who had gone from that volatile silence into frenzied horrified babbling where only a few coherent words rose and burst like bubbles on boiling water, _you can’t_ and _I didn’t_ and _don’t fall apart_ , running his hands over Asgore’s massive chest like he was trying to hold the monster king together before he fell to dust, and it looked like he would have gone on like that forever until Asgore silently reached out again and rested his hand on top of Chara’s head.

Asgore smiled.

“I’m fine,” he said, voice slightly strained. “Just a small shock, that’s all.”

Chara ducked away from his grip and backed off and slipped on the mess of paper on the floor, so that he lost his balance and sat down hard. Toriel stepped over to Asgore’s side and bent down, trying to get a look at his knee.

“Try and stand up,” she said. “Let me heal you, at least.”

“I’m perfectly capable of healing magic, Tori. It’s just a bit sore. Evidently Chara doesn’t hate me as much as he thought he did.” He looked at the corner of the room. “See to him instead. He doesn’t look well.”

Toriel turned and saw Chara there, sitting with his back to the oven door. He’d pulled his knees up to his chin and shoved his fingers so deep into his matted, tangled hair that he seemed unlikely to remove them again without considerable pain and effort. His skin had turned clammy and blotched with red.

“Oh, Chara,” said Toriel.

She knelt by his side and scooped him up in her arms. He didn’t resist but she still couldn’t help but shudder at the feel of him; he was shaking so badly it was like his bones were trying to claw right out of his flesh.

“I did it again,” he whispered. “I almost killed him _again…”_

She looked up at Asgore, her expression puzzled, but he waved her off. His other hand was clasped against his knee. Soft green light leaked from between his fingers.

“You did no such thing,” she said, turning back to Chara. “You see? He’s fine. You’re fine.” She put one hand on the small of his back, held him close to her breast. “Take a deep breath. It’s all right. You’re home.”

Little by little, Chara’s shivering stilled.

He asked, “Asriel isn’t here, right? He’s isn’t waiting to…I mean, he’s not hiding around a corner or something listening to us, right?”

“No. He’s still at school.”

“You swear?”

“I do.”

He twisted out of her grip a little bit and panned the kitchen with his gaze, as if waiting for a giveaway footstep or an unseen cough. Eventually his eyes settled on Asgore, who gave him an assuring nod. Only then did he appear satisfied.

“Okay,” Chara said. And then he burst into tears.

*   *   *

Sometimes, Asgore needed a confidante. A true advisor. Someone with a sober mind and a dry wit who would quietly listen to his problems, examine all possible avenues of inquiry, and deliver, in a calm and tactful manner, the most neutral, logical assessment of the situation.

_“So what you’re basically saying is, your other dead kid’s not dead anymore.”_

And sometimes he needed Undyne.

“That is broadly correct, yes. Pardon me a moment.” He grunted and bent down to retrieve another handful of papers with his double-plus-sized cell phone still to his ear, then patted them flat with his free hand and dropped them back onto the table’s ever-growing pile. His knee still ached every time it flexed.

“You know, Undyne,” he continued, “there are many people who would find news like this a little hard to believe.”

_“Nah, I’m used to it. In Alphys’ shows, humans are always coming back to life. Twice in one episode, sometimes! They had to have gotten the idea from somewhere, right?”_

“Well, I suppose that makes sense, but-”

_“Not to mention what happened with Asriel.”_

“That was a remarkable occurrence in itself, and-”

_“And Frisk! Man, from what I heard nothing keeps that little punk down.”_

“All right, all right, point conceded.” He settled back into his chair. “In any case, that’s why I wanted to have a quick word with Alphys. Do you know when she’ll be in?”

_“Not ‘til tomorrow, Your Majesty, sorry. She’s got her claws full with that whole get-together on tech…techno-etheric studies? Am I saying that right?”_

“Your guess is as good as mine.”

_“Yeah, anyhow, if this is as big a deal as you’re saying then I don’t wanna just spring the news on her out of nowhere. Should probably give her a little while to cool down after she gets home, too. If she just walks through the door and I tell her the King wants her to run tests on his latest not-dead kid she might do that thing where she laughs really loud at nothing and then locks herself in the bedroom with a carton of Rocky Pocky ice cream.”_

“That…would be unfortunate.”

_“I know, right? Can’t blame her, though, that stuff’s delicious.”_

From where he sat, Asgore could see out the kitchen entryway and beyond – the foyer of his house was flanked by the kitchen on the left, and his living room on the right, the latter of which was so mobbed with potted plants and sunny windows that it resembled a greenhouse more than anything. Toriel paced back and forth in that room, her own phone tucked under her ear. She’d taken it upon herself to clean Chara up and put him to bed while Asgore tidied up the kitchen. Now she was deep in conversation, somber, unsmiling.

“Well, give her as much time as you think is needed,” he said to Undyne. “We’ll need a few days to get Chara properly situated anyway. All that aside, how have you been?”

_“Pretty good! I mean, it kinda sucks not getting to punch bad guys anymore, but there aren’t really any bad guys left I can punch, so I guess that’s a good thing? And Alphys is doing great. She was scared of looking dorky in front of all these human scientists, but it turns out they’re all giant dorks too. She’s totally in her element.”_

“Good to know. She always was much too hard on herself, especially after that wretched business in the Core laboratory. Honestly, I can’t help but feel responsible…”

 _“Your Majesty, don’t beat yourself up,”_ Undyne said. _“You have people for that. People like me. I will beat you up if you start feeling sorry for yourself.”_

He stifled a chuckle at that. “You do know how to keep me honest.”

_“All in a day’s work. Speaking of, you and the kids oughta come into town one of these days and watch a taping of my show. Mettaton’s such a pain to deal with that someday soon I’ll probably kick his shiny butt and that’ll be that, but meanwhile I’m having a blast. Just think how many people are learning how to work a kitchen thanks to me!”_

“I do think of that sometimes.” Usually late at night, when he was in the grip of insomnia.

 _“Or hell, just have them come over to our place. Alphys and me just finished decorating and we’ve got so much ridiculous crap on the walls right now, it’s awesome.”_ Just by her tone of voice he could tell she was practically bouncing up and down from excitement. _“I bet they’d get a kick out of a weekend in the big city, you know?”_

“I’ll consider it. In all likelihood you and Chara would get along very well.”

Toriel’s conversation appeared to be taking a turn for the worse. Her gestures had become more animated, and Asgore could see her muzzle wrinkle back, exposing her fangs.

 _“Well, yeah,”_ Undyne said. _“I get along with everybody.”_ She paused. _“But, seriously, Your Majesty? I’m happy for you and the Queen. Sounds mushy, I know, but I always thought you two got a really raw deal with what happened to your kids.”_

Toriel had straightened up, pinched at the skin between her eyes. He recognized that gesture; it was her way of getting her temper under control.

“Thank you, Undyne,” he said quietly. “Of course, even this brings new challenges, but…I think I agree that it’s a good thing. And you know that you can just call me Asgore, right?”

_“Yeah, that’s never gonna happen.”_

He couldn’t help but grin at that. “In any case, I need to get going. Just let Alphys know I called whenever it’s convenient.”

_“Sure thing. Talk later!”_

“Soon as I can.”

He set the phone down and leaned forward, straining to hear the last apologetic, bedraggled scraps of Toriel’s conversation.

“…better leave it to me,” she said. “And I apologize if I was short with you, Sans, but it’s been an exhausting…no. No, that was not intentional.” She smiled. “Yes, you can have it anyway. No hard feelings, then? All right…yes, that’s fine. I’ll see you all soon. Send my love to your brother.”

She hung up, sighed heavily, and returned to the kitchen; after a quick examination of the floor, she scooped up a few wayward papers and placed them back on the table. Asgore watched her, sipping at his tea. It was stone cold by now, but he drank deep anyway.

“I want to apologize for his behavior,” she said.

“Nothing to apologize for.” He smacked his lips and put the mug down. “I’ve wanted to take a swing at this mess all day. It was tremendously cathartic, watching them fly off like that.”

“I meant your knee.”

“Oh. It’s fine, honestly. You walloped me harder when I was about to fight Frisk back then.”

She rolled her eyes. “Not one of my finer moments.”

“It was also one of your finest, depending on perspective.”

“But that reminds me.” She pulled out the chair across from his and sat down, her copper-colored eyes boring through him. “What did Chara mean when he said he’d almost killed you again? There was a first time?”

Asgore frowned, scratched one of his horns. “Had to give that a bit of thought myself. He probably meant the pie he and Asriel made. Remember, when I got food poisoning?”

“That was…they misread a _recipe_ , for heaven’s sake!”

“It seems he views it a bit more severely than that.” He paused. “You know, Chara ‘fell ill’ himself not long after I got better. Maybe he saw that mistake as a learning experience.”

Toriel made a noise somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and covered her face with one hand. “And I never even gave it any thought. Even after all this time. I’m so ashamed.”

“Neither of us could have possibly known, Tori. That might not bring you any comfort, but it’s the truth.”

She shook her head and said nothing. Asgore turned and gazed out the window; the sun had dipped well below its peak, casting its rusty light over the lawns. School would have ended by now. Frisk and Asriel, on their way home.

“You were on the phone with someone?” Toriel asked. He looked back to her; she’d lowered her hand, tried to look relaxed.

“Yes, with Undyne. Meant to get in touch with Alphys, but she’s still busy with work. I’d like to have her give Chara a checkup, once she’s able.”

“Asgore, you know I don’t approve. She isn’t that kind of doctor. Especially where humans are concerned.”

“No one’s more aware of that than her, I assure you. But given the circumstances, I think it’s worth a try. Chara doesn’t look to be sick, but after some of the things I’ve seen, I’d like to make sure his body is…stable.” Sticky, amorphous silhouettes loomed in both their minds.

“Fine,” Toriel said. “As long as we take him to a human doctor, as well.”

“Naturally. And I assume you were getting in touch with Sans?”

“Yes, he and Papyrus are looking after the children until I get back. We’re just lucky Papyrus’ schedule is clear, that young man has scarcely gotten a chance to sleep between all his diplomatic appointments.” She fretfully scratched at her chin. “Sans seemed oddly hostile when I told him the news, but that could have just been my imagination. I wish I hadn’t snapped at him the way I did. I know he’s been working hard.”

“We all have.”

“Speaking of which.” She leaned forward and her voice turned curt, businesslike. “I think that Chara should stay with you for the night. I’ll explain the situation to Frisk and Asriel and we’ll all get together tomorrow. That should make things go more smoothly.”

“That sounds like it would be best,” he agreed. He usually agreed, when she got like this.

“I’ll have to homeschool him for a bit, I think. If we tried to make him socialize him with the other children too quickly, there could be…well.” She moved on without finishing the thought. “I may need to have you on call to give me a little extra help, what with my schedule. Let me know if it’s not convenient for you, of course. Your duties as king are more important.”

“They’re not,” Asgore said, “but go on.”

“There’s not much else to say. I’ll phone you when we’re ready to have you and Chara over tomorrow evening. Make sure he’s properly dressed, please. I know that some of Asriel’s old clothes are still here, they may not fit but they’re better than those rags he had on before.”

“Yes, dear.”

“And don’t indulge that sweet tooth of his too much, it’ll ruin his appetite.”

“Yes, dear.”

“And you’re staying for dinner,” Toriel said. “That is not a request.”

“Yes, dear.”

“Good.” She exhaled and slumped back in her seat. “I think that’s everything, for now.”

“All right.” Asgore set his mug aside and reached out, parting the stacks on the table enough to plant his elbows and lean forward. His horned shadow stretched long across the kitchen beside him. His expression was solemn.

“With that all said,” Asgore went on, “a gold piece for your thoughts?”

“Excuse me?”

“About Chara’s return. Because he was right. We weren’t happy to see him.”

Toriel’s eyes narrowed dangerously. “That is completely-”

“When you came to my door you looked like you were struggling to wake up from a bad dream. You still do. We’ve both been trying to cope with his death for so long, when he showed up again we should have been elated. The same way we were with Asriel. But instead, I just feel…anxious. Like I’ve invited some terrible misfortune into our lives.” He nervously clicked his claws together as Toriel’s expression darkened further, but kept talking. “Why is that, do you think? It’s not because of what he did all those years ago. Regardless of what he might believe, Chara’s still a child. Children are allowed to make mistakes. It’s we adults who should know better.”

She remained silent for so long that Asgore feared she would simply get up and leave. But then her face softened, and she looked outside as if expecting to find answers in the play of shadows on the empty streets.

“He’s not like other children,” she said.

“Neither are Frisk and Asriel, to be fair.”

“He’s not like them, either,” she replied. “Frisk…you can tell how much he loves being here. For a while I thought he was hiding his own worries for our sake, but no. He’s truly overjoyed to have come out of that mountain with all of us. You can see that happiness every day from the moment he wakes up in the morning. Asriel is a bit more reserved, after all he’s been through, but I think he’s still trying to put all that behind him. He wants to live his life, even if he doubts himself, from time to time.” She looked back at Asgore, and her eyes shone overbright. “But Chara? Few people ever climbed Mt. Ebott for a happy reason. There must have been something he couldn’t find, in the life he had before. Something he couldn’t go on without. We tried our best to give him everything he may have lacked. But when he had the opportunity, without a moment’s regret, he still threw his life away. On a whim.” She dabbed at her cheeks with her sleeve and kept talking, steadier. “I can’t help but feel he’s spent all his time on this earth trying to leave it. Now he’s back in our care, and yes, I’m afraid. Because if I try to be a mother to him again, knowing what I do now, and he still chooses to…disappear, I’ll never forgive myself. It would be one failure too many.”

Asgore thought it over, then nodded slowly. “Yes. That seems sensible.”

“I just wish I knew what he went through during all this time. He didn’t make a good impression when he came here, but that was nothing compared to what I saw when he appeared in my classroom. Asgore, he looked so _old.”_

“Why not ask him?” he said mildly. “That would be the simplest solution.”

She began to say something, and then backed away in her seat, glanced over her shoulder at Asgore’s parlor and the bedrooms beyond. “That’s…I mean, he must be asleep by now…”

“Perhaps. Perhaps not. There’s no harm in checking. And he’ll open up to you, I’m sure of it. He always liked you best anyway.” She opened her mouth. “Don’t argue, Tori, you know it’s true. He even started talking like you towards the end, though he’d probably deny it if you brought it up now.”

She hung her head, then stood and pushed her chair back in. “I won’t be long.”

“Take your time.”

She left the room. He remained in his seat and listened to the footsteps, the knocking, and, while he didn’t hear Frisk and Asriel’s bedroom door open or close, the weightier silence in the house confirmed that Chara had let her in.

He got up from his seat and took the mugs to the sink. He rinsed them both out, disposed of the leaves, washed the teapot, washed the kettle. Then he returned to the table, picked up a letter, retrieved his glasses, and started to read.

“Meanwhile,” he said, “life goes on.”

*   *   *

Although Frisk and Asriel only slept over on weekends, Asgore still kept a room in his house reserved especially for them, and stepping inside was a disorienting experience. It lacked his menagerie of plant life and the furniture was built to normal scale, so visitors would briefly feel much too tall, and notice that the tang of chlorophyll had left the air. It was also cluttered, because despite Toriel’s admonishments the king spoiled his children rotten – books and toys littered the carpet, a sizable TV took up one corner of the room, and the nightstands by each of the twin beds were mobbed by small picture frames containing Frisk’s sketches, Asriel’s photographs. One of Asriel’s pictures in particular, a wide shot of the world from the cliff outside Mt. Ebott’s barrier cavern, had been blown up and hung on the wall between the beds. He’d snapped it during his and Frisk’s illicit hike up the mountain last fall. Despite herself, Toriel couldn’t help but be proud of it; she had her own copy hanging in her house.

When Toriel had brought Chara in here and put him to bed, she’d had to gingerly step around the mess on the floor, her way lit by the warm sunlight streaming in the picture window on the far wall. Now the curtains were drawn, turning all outlines dingy and soft, like something viewed through bad glass. And the toys and books had all been put on their shelves or arranged in a neat perimeter along the wall, largest to smallest. Chara sat up in bed, kneading something between his thumb and forefingers, staring at the wall. He didn’t look at Toriel as she closed the door behind her.

“This is Asriel’s bed, isn’t it,” Chara said, and held up a tuft of white fur. “He sheds.”

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t know what to say.

“Don’t tell him I cracked up like that,” he added. “The last time was embarrassing enough.”

“I won’t tell.” She gestured to the bed. “May I?”

“Do what you want.”

She walked over and sat down on the end of the bed, hands folded in her lap. She could see Chara fully now. He’d washed and dressed himself in a set of Asriel’s old pajamas – and she could see how the sleeves stopped a couple inches short of his wrists – but even with the dirt and blood cleaned away the look of him still made her heart ache. In the bedroom’s murk he was so pale that he seemed almost grey, like the underside of a mushroom. His hair curled in thin tendrils around his neck and shoulders, except for his bangs, which were a mass of jagged cowlicks framing the livid tattoo of bruise on his forehead. Every part of him was bent and lolled, as though he couldn’t support his own weight.

“It’s a beautiful day out,” she said at last. “Why did you draw the curtains?”

“Memories,” he replied, and that was that. His fingers toyed restlessly with one another. His throat worked like he was trying to cough something up. Toriel guessed what he was trying to say next.

“Your father – Asgore – he’s unhurt. And he already cleaned up the floor. So don’t worry.”

He said nothing, but sank a little deeper into the pillows.

“We decided that you should stay with him tonight. I’ll tell Asriel and Frisk the news, then we can all enjoy dinner together tomorrow evening.” She tried to smile. “It may be wishful thinking on my part, but I assume you missed my cooking.”

“So you’re not living together anymore.”

“We…no. We’re separated.” She looked down, plucked at the folds of her dress. “A lot happened, between us. Since you and Asriel…that is to say, when you-”

“Died.”

“Yes. Asgore was furious. Angrier than I’ve ever seen him. He stood before all the monsters mourning the two of you, and in the heat of the moment, he took action.”

“I know what he did,” Chara said. “I was there.”

Toriel stared. “You-”

“I remember the look on his face. He regretted what he said as soon as the words came out of his mouth. And did you notice the way his knees started shaking? He wanted to turn and run away right from the start.” Chara raised his head and looked straight forward, eyes shadowed with recollection, studying the patterns on the wall. “It took a few days before you got sick of him. That was when you went and pulled my body out of the basement. But he caught up to you, in that hallway with all the stained glass. You waited for him to say something. I guess you were giving him a chance. But he stayed quiet, and you left, and that was the last time you saw him until Frisk came along. I was there.”

Toriel’s jaw hung agape; she had become rigid as a figurine, unbreathing, unblinking.

“I was there.” His voice was dull and dead. “Watching, when you left him. When the other six fell. When Asriel came back the first time. All of Asriel’s resets. All of Frisk’s resets. I was there for all of it. It wasn’t that bad. You get used to it, like anything.” He paused, and, briefly, his lip trembled. “I just wish it hadn’t been so cold.”

She reached out and seized him and pulled him up and away from the covers, holding him close to her chest. Her eyes wide and welling up, teardrops falling off her muzzle and pattering on his head. She didn’t look at him. She glared at nothing as if condemning the room itself. Chara stayed silent in her embrace, limp as a ragdoll.

“How?” she managed to say. “How are children allowed to suffer like this? What kind of horrible, unjust world can allow-”

“This is something you can’t blame the world for,” he said, muffled against her clothes. “Everything that happened since then was because of me. It was my plan. It took me a long time to figure it out, but I deserved-”

 _“No.”_ She gripped his shoulders and pushed him out, leaning in so close that the tip of her nose almost touched his. “I can forgive a great deal, Chara, but don’t you ever say that around me again. Don’t you _dare.”_

He tried to stare her down, but Toriel’s glower could make paintings blink. Eventually he turned away, slid out of her grip.

“It doesn’t matter.” He pulled the covers back over himself. “It happened. I can’t take it back. And believe me, I tried.”

“You can move on from it. Make a new life for yourself up here. Your father and I will-”

“I’m not sure there’s any coming back from this.”

“Then why did you return to us? Especially with Asriel so close by?”

His placid, downcast expression winced a little at that. “I guess I was hoping you’d be angry. Give me a reason to go back where I came from.”

“You don’t know us as well as you think.”

“It’s not the first time I’ve been wrong.” He shrugged, and looked up at her. “But what about you? The two of you used to be so mushy with each other that it almost made me gag sometimes. But that’s gone now, isn’t it? Sometimes things break. You can’t put them back together again.” His voice turned almost pleading. “So just don’t blame yourself for…whatever might happen. I didn’t come back here for you to fix me.”

“You are aware of what Asgore did to the other humans who fell, yes?”

He blinked at that, taken aback. The pity had gone out of Toriel’s stare. She looked stern, almost bemused.

“You’re talking about the souls?” he asked.

“Yes. Were you there when he took them, as well? Did he appear to particularly enjoy it?”

“He…no, he didn’t.”

“There are some things you’ve missed since we all came to the surface,” she told him. “Asgore was haunted by his actions. Understandably so. I resented him for what he did – how he behaved, since he made that promise – but he appeared to prefer that to how everyone else acted. Monsters everywhere showering him in gratitude, praising his name for helping them go free, and he could not stop thinking about those children. So, quite unbeknownst to me, he began a project of his own. Seeking out the descendants of those children, and confessing his crimes to them personally.” Chara gaped, and she nodded. “Yes, that was my reaction as well. Imagine how vulnerable he was making himself. All of us. A single moment of anger could have spelled the end of his life, the start of another war. But he was determined to see it through.”

“Did he even find any of them?”

“He found all of them,” Toriel said. “Sometime near the end of winter, he told me he was finished. And there he is, in the next room, making his tea and watering those ridiculous tiny trees of his. I never asked him for details. I don’t know if it even helped him find peace. But…he’s trying to move forward. Despite everything.”

The sun was setting low now, so that even the sliver of light coming through the curtain had turned bloody and dim. Toriel’s white-furred head hung over Chara like a phantom, stiff-necked and solemn, an echo of the regal figure she’d been before.

“And I was the same way,” she said. “Not too different from you, in a sense. I locked myself away because I was convinced our people did not deserve understanding. Too violent, too mean to ever fit in with the outside world. But every day, I try to prove myself wrong.” She sighed. “I abandoned my responsibilities as a ruler, and truth be told, I wasn’t a very good caretaker, either. But that school…if some of those human children leave it, and grow up, and carry fond memories of a certain foolish old woman who made their days a little brighter, they may treat us more kindly. That has to be enough, for now.” She reached out and took his hand. “I’m not going to try and ‘fix’ you. There’s nothing to be fixed. But if you want to count yourself part of this family again…well, I think you’ll be in good company.”

Chara said nothing.

“Not to mention,” she added briskly, “you’ll be getting a proper education. I won’t enroll you in classes right away, but I will be teaching you at home. I still have my lesson plan from when I attempted to tutor Frisk in the Ruins.”

She felt his hand clenched under her own. Then, it relaxed.

Chara said, hesitantly, “I’m really bad at math.”

She chuckled and ruffled his hair. “Lots of people are.”

“I’m a little tired,” he said. “You should be getting home too, right? It’s late. And,” he pursed his lips, glanced away, “I’ll think about what you said.”

“That’s all I ask.” The springs creaked as she stood up from the bed. “Goodnight, Chara. Be good, all right?”

“I’ll try,” he said. And then: “Goodnight.”

He didn’t watch as Toriel left the room. He heard the door click shut, then murmured conversation in the house beyond, and then another door open and close; then there was the startled grunt of Toriel’s car outside and the purr of the engine, already fading away. Only when it disappeared entirely did he rise from the bed.

He padded across the room, to the window, and pulled open the curtains. The sun had kissed the horizon now; overhead he saw the sky churning purple with clouds shot through it like froth. He still shuddered a little at the lingering warmth from that light on his skin, but held his ground, watching the sunset, and behind him his shadow printed on the wall faded as the night fell, until it bled into the surrounding dark and disappeared.


	4. The Brothers

Most homes bore the mark of the owner’s personality in some way – the knickknacks on display, the arrangement of the furniture, the cleanliness or lack thereof, all that and more told its own subtle story about the person who lived there. Toriel’s house had more marks than an entire stack of pop quiz papers, and the story they told was compellingly odd. Flowerbeds in front barely clinging to life with immaculately kept potted plants on the front sill; walls crowded with amateurish photographs, slanted and bleary; a refrigerator bearing a few humble pencil-and-crayon sketches of Toriel and her children; a collection of DVD’s that included several human documentaries (mostly nature and history) alongside human “documentaries” (cartoons with improbably large swords and hair) and a laminated sheet of paper covered in a binary autograph. A kitchen so clean it was practically lacquered, save for some white fur in the sink drain and a safely contained spaghetti sample brewing in the back of the fridge. A stray sock. An embroidered eyepatch. A quantum physics textbook with margins full of pie recipes.

In fact, Toriel’s home was the informal meeting-place for her family and friends – Asgore’s home was always open to visitors, but its strange proportions made most of them feel dizzy after a while – and since her circle of friends also included Frisk’s, it was a very large circle indeed. It had calmed down a little bit now that Undyne and Alphys were out of town and Papyrus’ and Sans’ work schedule had grown more hectic, but everyone still came and went, leaving evidence of their passing behind. Christmas had been interesting. The neighbors probably would have complained about the noise if they hadn’t all been invited, too.

But now the house was silent, save for the tick of an unseen clock. The windows lit up as the mouth of the evening closed over the town. Frisk sat on the patched, overstuffed sofa in front of the coffee table, the blank TV on the opposite wall reflecting his pensive, heavy-lidded expression. He had a spray of paper in front of him and appeared to be cross-referencing the material; right now he was looking between a word search, the newspaper’s Sudoku page, and the horoscope.

“So he just ignores the words you’re supposed to find on the word search, but then looks for hints _here_ , and then he solves these puzzles in like five minutes somehow, and he skips the number of words on _those_ to find them on the word search, but then...” He gave up and sank back into the couch. “I think I liked it better when Papyrus stuck to jigsaw puzzles.”

Asriel sat crosslegged on a recliner in the far corner – it was, in fact, the same reading chair that had been in New Home, brought up and restored by Asgore. The last dwindling light of dusk bruised his fur purple. He stared down at his phone and said nothing.

One of Asriel’s photographs of Papyrus was actually hanging on the wall just above his head. It had been taken in winter, and Papyrus stood ankle-deep in the snow, cheerful as ever, dressed in a tasteful earth-tone anorak and scarf. It had been generally agreed that he would need to update his look a little bit as monsterkind’s ambassador, and Mettaton had been happy to volunteer his services; after several weeks of lectures and presentations, involving first a color wheel and then a ten-part series of slide shows and finally Mettaton’s chainsaw, he’d managed to wean Papyrus away from his battle body and the kaleidoscopic motley that passed for his casual wear. He actually looked quite dapper these days, in no small part because he was built like a clothes rack. Even Sans made concessions, now. On the most formal of occasions, he wore shoes with laces and pants that went all the way down to his ankles.

The two skeletons had taken off to get pizza for dinner (Papyrus’ offer to cook had been quickly diverted after Sans had seen the children’s pleading faces), but they were taking a long time, and that was after Frisk had noticed Sans in the middle of a lengthy and hushed phone call with Toriel that had ended with him looking like a whipped dog. Even Papyrus had caught on to the general tension in the atmosphere; his ever-cheerful attempts to keep Frisk and Asriel diverted had gained a distinct tinge of desperation. When they’d finally left the house, it had felt like a tactical retreat.

“I hope they come back soon,” Frisk said. “Mom’ll go ballistic if she finds out we’re home alone.”

“I don’t think so,” Asriel muttered. “We’ve been on our own before.”

“Yeah, that’s true. When was her last text?”

“Five minutes ago.” A moment passed. “Six minutes. Should I call her again? No. No, that’s a bad idea. That’ll make her think I’m freaking out and then she’ll start freaking out. Won’t she?”

The two of them had been as surprised as anyone when they’d come back from recess to find Sans with his slipper-clad feet up on Toriel’s desk – it was the first time she’d ever called in a substitute, let alone on such short notice – and while both he and Toriel had assured them everything was fine, they seemed hesitant to get into specifics. Frisk had shrugged it off at first; his optimism was almost unassailable. But Asriel wore his anxiety on his sleeve, and it was becoming contagious.

“If it was anything serious she’d have told us already.” Frisk said. “I mean...you don’t think anything happened to Dad, do you?”

Asriel’s claws made one last quick navigation on his phone’s screen. He rocked back and forth for a moment, tugged one long ear, then looked up, his muzzle twitching restlessly, exposing the stubs of his fangs. All the nervous tics he’d suppressed over the months were coming back at once.

“Hey, Frisk. I can tell you everything, right? You won’t say I’m crazy or imagining things or anything like that?”

“We’ve both seen some really weird stuff, Asriel. I think you’re fine.”

“Yeah, remember that one time I died and came back as a flower? Boy, that was something.” He let out a brief, jagged giggle, and then his face sagged again. “But this is...it’s just a hunch. But I think I know why Mom left all of a sudden.”

“Okay, why?”

 “It’s just something I saw. When I came back to class, there were some dirty footprints on the floor. Like, really dirty. Kind of reminded me of the mud in Waterfall, that stuff sticks to you like glue. And they looked to be about the right size, and they stopped next to my desk, a-and.” He swallowed hard. “Frisk, I think Chara’s back.”

A long silence. The clock broke off the seconds like twigs.

“You promised you’d believe me,” Asriel said desperately.

Frisk’s expression was inscrutable. He turned to the TV, as if interrogating his reflection. Then his head swiveled back to Asriel.

“I saw him die,” he said, voice shaking a bit. “I couldn’t stop him.”

“I know. He told me he was going to do that before he did it, and then I told him you’d try to stop him, and then he did, and you couldn’t, like I said. But I think he’s back. It’s the only thing that makes sense. There’s the footprints, and Mom leaving like that, and I tried texting Dad too but neither of them will tell me _anything_.”

“But Asriel, how could he have-”

“I don’t know. I don’t know! Maybe it was my fault? That’s usually the right answer, haha.” His voice was rising steadily, his gestures turning frantic. “I was basically a god when I had all those souls but it’s not like all that power came with a manual, maybe I did something! And what about the other human souls? Did I bring them back? _Should_ I have brought them back? Do you think they’re out there somewhere like Chara was and they’re watching me and they’re mad because I didn’t- ow. Ow. _Ow.”_

Frisk straightened up in his seat as Asriel whimpered and gingerly touched the top of his head. The pale buds of his horns were barely visible under his fur.

“Are you okay?” Frisk asked. “I can go get aspirin, or something-”

“No, it’s all right. Just got to suck it up, haha.” He lowered his hands and smiled unconvincingly. “I’m probably getting off easy. Dad told me that when his were coming in, he had to sleep with a bag of ice tied to his head for a whole month.”

Asriel’s horns had begun to emerge a few weeks ago, about a hundred years too late, but later was better than never. He’d been ecstatic when he’d first seen them in the mirror, less so when he’d learned about the splitting headaches that came with them. He said once that it felt like someone was pounding nails out through the inside of his skull.

He got up from the recliner and leaned against the windowsill beside the front door, watching the empty, darkened street, the streetlights suspended like pearls in deep water. The potted plants on the sill – gifts from Asgore’s personal stock, cared for by Asriel himself, who’d already shown more of a green thumb than his mother – brushed the underside of his muzzle. He paid them no mind.

“She’s got to come home soon,” he said. “She’ll have to tell us then. But he’s back. I can feel it. Chara’s back.”

“I believe you,” Frisk said. “But why are you so worried? You can finally see each other again. That's a good thing, right?” No response. “Asriel?”

The glare of headlights swept across the window, and in their glow Asriel was briefly printed in relief, every stray hair sharp and dark as pencil-strokes. His claws dug into the wood. He stared down the light until his eyes watered.

“I’m thinking about it,” he said. “Let me think about it.”

*   *   *

The next day.

The skies were clear and the breeze was cool, carrying a hint of cut grass and pollen. Asgore loomed in front of Toriel’s front door, which was approximately half a foot shorter than him. Chara stood in the king’s shadow as if taking shelter.

“I wish she’d install a doorbell,” Asgore muttered. “Every time I knock I’m afraid I’ll break this thing down.” He looked down at Chara. “Nervous?”

Chara was stock-still, staring straight ahead. Asgore had gotten him some of Asriel’s old clothes and given his hair a brief, cautious trim back to his old neck-length mop, and while all his cuffs were too short and his skin was still unpleasantly pallid, he looked a bit more like he had when he’d first arrived in the Underground.

“I’m not nervous,” he said. “But you seem to be.”

“Ha. You have me there. Since we came to the surface I’ve always been a bit concerned about making a fool of myself in front of your mother.” He tugged his beard. “And considering they probably know we’re just standing in front of the house, I suppose I’m not off to a good start. Well, nothing ventured...”

With infinite care, he rapped on the front door. It opened half a second later. Asgore looked in front of him and saw nothing, just the empty entrance. Then he looked down and saw Frisk’s grinning face.

“Mom!” Frisk called. “Dad’s here!”

Asgore grinned back and dropped to his knee, wincing a bit as he did so. “I certainly am. How have you-

Before he could finish speaking, Frisk lunged forward and wrapped his arms around Asgore’s thick neck, burying  his face in his beard; Asgore dramatically rose and lurched a few steps back as if struck by a cannonball, holding Frisk in his arms. It all had the feel of something rehearsed.

“Goodness, you get bigger every time I see you,” Asgore chuckled. “Keep this up and you’ll be carrying me around before long.”

“I think only Undyne’s allowed to do that,” Frisk said.

“Yes, well, Undyne’s always been good at picking things up, it’s putting them down again where she runs into-”

Someone cleared their throat.

The two of them looked up to see Toriel in the doorway, her forearms streaked with flour, and Chara beside her, looking up at Frisk. Both of them wore bemused expressions.

“Greetings,” Chara said dryly. “Having fun up there?”

For a time, there was only the murmur of the wilted flowers in the breeze.

 “Hi, Chara,” Frisk said, eventually. He patted Asgore’s shoulder. “Dad, can you...?”

“Oh, I apologize.” Asgore carefully set him down again, but Chara had gone, stepping around Toriel and into the house. When the rest of them came in, Asgore slightly favoring one leg, Chara was already in the middle of the living room, gazing around with the air of an auditor.

“Dinner won’t be ready for another half hour or so,” Toriel said. “It’s not often I cook for this many people anymore, I forget how long it takes.”

Asgore said, “I’m sure we can keep ourselves entertained. Right, Chara?”

“Where’s Asriel?”

Chara's question hung in the air like smoke. It took several seconds of no one answering before he turned around, his stare penetrating.

“Where is he?” he asked.

 “He’s in our room, still,” Frisk said, and glanced worriedly at Toriel. “He’s been really quiet ever since Mom told us you were back.”

“He’s probably asleep,” she muttered to Asgore. “He wouldn’t miss this, I’m sure.”

“Makes sense to me,” Asgore replied. “Frisk, can you go upstairs and tell your brother that-”

“It’s all right,” said Chara. “Give him his space. Me and Frisk have some catching up to do, anyway.” He looked at Toriel. “Can you give us some time alone?”

She glanced back and forth between him and Frisk. “Well...I suppose dinner is more or less taking care of itself...”

“It’s fine, Mom,” Frisk said.

“All right,” she said, resigned. “In that case, Asgore, maybe you can help me. I’m having no luck with these perennials out front.”

 “Yes, I noticed. No need to worry, it’s still early in the season. I’m sure they can be salvaged with a bit of...”

They shut the front door and their voices cut out. Chara and Frisk were left alone, with only the ticking clock to keep them company. Chara tried to stare Frisk down but quickly gave up; it was a futile effort against someone who didn’t visibly blink. He noticed that, despite what Asgore had said, Frisk was still a little shorter than him. He took some small victory in that, at least.

 “He thinks I don’t notice the limp,” Chara said.

“What?”

“Nothing.” He took in the room again – the familiar recliner, the cool blue carpeting, the array of photographs on the walls. “So. Here we are.”

“I’m glad you’re back,” Frisk piped up. “We never really got a chance to talk much before, when we met.”

“Because I was trying to kill you,” he said flatly. “I was trying very, very hard. But something tells me you don’t care.”

Frisk shrugged. “A lot of people tried to kill me. I got used to it.”

“Remember when I said that you and Asriel would never be normal? This is what I meant.”

“I know. But it’s okay. Most of my friends are pretty weird, too.”

He turned away and paced up the length of the wall, eyeing the photographs – landscapes, monsters, Toriel’s school, several of Frisk and his parents. “Is she trying to take up a new hobby? These are terrible.”

“Most of them are Asriel’s. He’s not really proud of them either, but Mom keeps framing ones that she likes.”

“Oh.” He stopped in front of a picture of a snowy landscape, lashed with the shadows of tree branches and a set of rabbit tracks running like stitches across the shot’s periphery, and tilted his head. “This one’s not so bad.”

“Yeah, he takes them all the time. You should’ve seen his face when he found out phones have cameras in them now.”

“Let me guess. Because there’s no-”

“-lens cap,” Frisk finished. “That’s what he said.”

“It drove me crazy how often he forgot about that stupid thing. I was planning to just take the cap off myself and toss it somewhere in Waterfall,” Chara said, wistfulness tugging at the edge of his voice. Then, a long pause. “That was a few days before he told me he wanted to cook something for his dad.” A longer pause. “It’s funny, the things you remember.”

Neither of them spoke for a while. Chara kept staring at the picture as if hypnotized by it. The black glass of the TV screen turned the room into a photo of its own – Chara and Frisk reflected in its oblong, hands limp at their sides, faces solemn, unruly hair blocking all their eyes from view.

“Can we go outside, or something?” Chara said. “Feels like someone’s eavesdropping on us.”

They both knew who he meant.

“Sure,” said Frisk. “The back door’s out through the kitchen. This way.”

They passed through the house and into a miasma of pie crust, garlic, and something that was probably not licorice. Frisk grinned again when he saw Chara’s expression shift.

“I bet you know what that is.”

“It’s snail pie,” he sighed. “Does she even know how to cook anything that’s not under a crust?”

“Oh, yeah, all kinds of stuff. But she said you’d like to have this again.”

“It’s not that I liked it, I just hardly ever ate anything else.”

The backyard was sparse but cozy, a trampled piebald lawn where a single elm tree stood in one corner like a monument. The neighbors’ rooftops peeked out from over the fence encircling the yard, but the whole neighborhood had gone quiet. All they could hear was the rustle of leaves, and the crunch of grass underfoot, and lonely birdsong down the street. Dusk had fallen again. The sky, going rusted.

Frisk sat under the tree as Chara patrolled the yard, casting a critical eye at the dead and yellowed patches of grass. He bent down and pulled out a handful of weeds, turning the sticky tendrils over in his fingers.

“I know she’s bad at gardening, but this is just depressing,” he said. “Why’d she even try to plant flowers out front? Her cactus at Home almost died of thirst.”

“It’s not just her. Dad’s still trying to copy her pies. I don’t really understand it either.”

“Something you don’t understand? That’s a first.” He looked back at him and glimpsed a flash of gold on his neck, at the edge of his shirt. “Still wearing it, huh?” Frisk looked confused. “The locket.”

“Oh, right.” He reached into his shirt and extracted the necklace, the small gold heart twinkling on the end of its chain. “It’s Asriel’s, actually. He’s wearing yours now.”

Chara didn’t respond.

Frisk said, “But you can have this one, if you-”

“Put it back, Frisk.” He cast the weeds aside. “I never asked for those things in the first place. It was another one of Asriel’s ideas.”

“Then why’d you wear it?”

Chara’s face twitched, like he’d bitten into something sour. He turned and scanned the house, the windows on the second floor, looking for movement from beyond the glass.

“Asriel knew you’d come back,” Frisk said quietly. “Even before Mom told us. He said it was his fault.”

“He’s probably right. I don’t really care how it happened, though. The only person who might be able to find out for sure is Sans and I don’t ever want to see him again. I bet he feels the same way.”

 “He was kind of upset last night, yeah. Mom must have told him that you were back, and I don’t think he ever let anyone else know about all that stuff that happened in the Core, but I’m sure that he’ll be okay if you and him just-”

“Don’t bother.”

Frisk fell silent. The wind blew Chara’s hair askew and he reached up and brushed it away from his eyes. The bruise on his forehead still throbbed at the touch. The lean marker of his shadow stretched across the yard. When the two of them had first met face to face, that shadow had been a predator – a sea of ravenous dark that had encircled Frisk, ready to tear him apart.

“Remember what Asriel told you all those times you couldn’t save him,” Chara said. “People can’t fix everything by being nice. Not even you.” He turned and regarded Frisk. “That reminds me. Can you still reset?”

For the first time since they met Frisk looked genuinely uncomfortable; he wouldn’t meet Chara’s eyes, and squirmed as if trying to sink into the tree bark and disappear. “I haven’t really checked.”

“I was being serious, back then. When I said that all of this can’t possibly last.” The sun dipped further and Chara’s shadow crawled across the lawn like a compass needle. “Humanity’s not going to humor monsters forever. There’ll be a reckoning, eventually. Maybe another war, maybe worse. When that happens, you might want to keep your options open. Just some advice.” His stare finally relented. “But fine, don’t listen. You never did, anyway.”

“Chara?”

“What?”

“Why do you hate humans so much? I never figured it out. Asriel said you never told him why, either. And everyone I’ve met has been really nice.”

“Does it even matter anymore?”

“It might make you feel better if you told someone,” Frisk said. And then he shut up, because Chara was smiling at him now. Not that rictus grin cold and hard as the grille of an oncoming truck, but still faintly unpleasant – a sharp little smirk that came nowhere near his eyes.

“Fair enough,” he said, and took a few steps towards Frisk, his scarecrow-thin frame looming against the twilight. “I’ll tell you. But first, you can answer a question of mine.”

“What?”

“Why did you climb Mt. Ebott?”

Frisk blanched. He looked away, clutching his knees.

“I was always curious about that,” Chara said. “All that time I was with you, you never said a word about it. Not a hint, not even when you thought you were all alone. You haven’t even told Asriel, have you? And here I thought you two were best friends now.” Frisk’s grip tightened, but then Chara said, softer, “It’s all right.”

Frisk looked up at that and saw Chara’s smirk blunted. Now he just looked rueful, tired.

“I know why you won’t tell,” he said. “Because you want to believe that you’re...how can I say it. Two people at once? Who you were before you fell, and who you were after. They’re both you. But there’s only one person you _want_ to be, here and now. If you let anyone else know about the life you had before – let those little secrets out of your head, into the world – then it’s like bringing that other you back. Because they never left. No matter how hard you try to ignore them.” He shook his head. “I’ve been through a lot. There’s a few things I guess I'd go back and fix, if I could. But I never, ever want to feel like that person again.”

Frisk remained silent, but most of the cheer had drained out of his face. He cast a quick glance to the back door, possibly hoping for the shadow of Toriel.

“And you know what?” Chara added. “I just realized something. All those people I hated up on the surface – the ones who hurt me and Asriel – they’re all dead now. But we’re still alive.” His smile turned brittle. “That means I win after all, right?”

“I don’t know,” Frisk answered, hesitantly. “Do you feel like you won?”

And he didn’t have an answer for that. Instead he quickly swiped his eyes with his sleeve, and turned, and sat down beside Frisk. The tree boughs overhead had just begun to shed their buds; coral-colored petals littered the earth, and the new leaves stuck out green and erect as toy soldiers. Frisk chewed his lip, then perked up again.

“This reminds me of the last time we met. Remember, when you were still in Asriel’s body and we were resting under that big tree I-”

“Don’t even talk to me about that tree. I hate that tree. I think it started tripping me on purpose after a while.” Chara thumped the trunk behind him. “One of the only good things about leaving the Underground is that I don’t have to deal with it anymore.”

Frisk’s features rearranged, subtly – his face was usually a collection of neutral lines anyway, but it smoothed out further, became opaque as lead. And when he spoke again, it was casual, conversational, suspiciously innocuous.

He said, “I guess you wanted it to leaf you alone.”

“That’s right. Not like it can reach me all the way out...wait, did you just-”

“Don’t worry,” Frisk said, somber as a judge. “Its bark is worse than its bite.”

“Stop it. Oh my God, what are you doing?”

“But I guess it gave you some deep-rooted anxiety,” Frisk mused.

“I said stop! This isn’t funny! Why am I _laughing?”_

What Chara was doing couldn’t be called laughing, exactly – he was much too out of practice, his body was still working out the correct procedure, so his face was a warped deathmask and his breath rattled like a pea at the bottom of a tin can – but he had both hands pressed over his belly and was having considerable trouble keeping upright. Frisk continued to stare straight ahead, his words flat and thoughtful as a reflecting pool.

“Looks like you were just pining for some good jokes,” he said, and Chara fell over, his body a coiled ampersand on the grass. “I’m glad that you’re feeling oak-ay now,” he added, and Chara started to pound at the dirt.

“Frisk,” he gasped. “I give up. I can’t...can’t t-take...”

Frisk finally, mercifully, fell silent. Chara took several whooping breaths and pushed himself upright again, hair wilder than usual, rubbing hard at his cheeks.

“That _hurt_ ,” he said. “When did you start telling jokes? You never told jokes.”

“Pretty much right after you stopped following me in the Underground. Blame Sans.”

“I’m surprised Asriel hasn’t lost his mind already. His mom’s sense of humor made him want to jump out a window.” He stole another glance at the house. “I really hope he didn’t see any of that.”

“Do you feel better now?”

He turned back to Frisk, small tics still spasming in his cheeks. He seemed reluctant to speak. But then the back door opened, and Toriel’s voice echoed across the yard:

_“Frisk! Chara! Dinner!”_

“Didn’t take as long as I thought,” Chara said, deftly changing the subject. Then the smell from inside wafted across the yard – the garlic aroma sharper, the crust with a new, piquant tang – and his stomach growled, long and low. He became very still. He refused to look at Frisk’s grin.

“I knew you liked Mom’s cooking.”

“It’s just been a while since I ate anything but leftovers, that’s all.” The scent wafted again, and again his stomach grumbled, louder. “I mean, the crunchy parts are all right. Shut up! You ate _spiders_ down there, you don’t get to judge me.”

“It was the best way to make Muffet calm down.” Frisk stood up, brushed dirt off his pants.

“Oh, sure, that’s why you kept buying extra doughnuts after, what, the second loop? You took your time eating them and everything. I could see _legs_ sticking out.”

“Those were a little annoying. They got caught in my teeth.”

“Watching you bite into those things made me want to throw up, and I didn’t even have a stomach...”

And they were still bickering when they walked back into the house.

*   *   *

Toriel’s dinner didn’t last long. Frisk always cleaned his plate at the worst of times, and Asgore and Chara went at her latest pie with such fervor that their forks almost beat out a drum solo against their plates. It wasn’t ten minutes before the food was reduced to a few sad scraps of crust and shell in the pie tin.

Asriel’s piece remained untouched, his place at the table undisturbed. He still hadn’t left his room. Even as he’d chewed, Chara had kept glancing to that seat, to the kitchen entrance, to the rest of the family’s faces. Then, with finality, Toriel dropped her fork.

“I’m calling him down,” she said. “He needs to eat.”

Frisk raised a hand. “I’ll go, Mom. I can take his piece up to our room, if it’s okay. He won’t get crumbs on the carpet or anything, I pro-”

“I’ll talk to him.”

They all turned round as Chara’s chair scraped across the floor.

“It’s what he’s waiting for, anyway,” he said. “I might take a while. Frisk, make sure no one interrupts us.”

Frisk looked to his parents, looked to Chara, then nodded and said, “Okay.”

Chara went through the living room, stopped at the foot of the stairs. No one had turned on the lights and the fading sun made everything soft-edged and indistinct as a dream; the staircase looked like it had been carved from fog. He walked up, slowly. Not a single board creaked under his feet.

The upstairs hall was flanked by more photos, most notably a copy of Asriel’s shot from the barrier cavern’s cliffside, reduced to a meaningless whorl of color in the murk. Only one door was shut, plain and white-painted, almost glowing. Chara stopped and stood before it like someone condemned. He raised his hand to knock, then lowered it, and gripped the knob. It turned without a sound.

When he saw Frisk and Asriel’s bedroom he was almost struck dizzy by déjà-vu. This was New Home but not at all. There were the two twin beds on opposite sides, and the nightstand, and Asriel’s blank-eyed stuffed animals huddled like conspirators in the corner, but there were also small twin desks, and the armoire was gone, in its place a window that let in the last dying vestige of sun that striped across the carpet and divided the place in two.

Asriel sat on the edge of his bed, head lowered, hands on his knees. He didn’t look up when Chara entered. Chara waited for him to move or speak, and when he didn’t, he turned back to the door, closed it, and turned the lock.

The springs on Frisk’s bed creaked as Chara sat down opposite Asriel.

“It’s me,” he said.

“I know,” Asriel replied. And that was all.

“Your mom finished dinner but I guess you knew that already. It’s hard to miss the smell.” No reply. Chara drummed on his knees a little, and said, “I think this is the first time we’ve actually been face to face since...well, everything happened. I know we talked before the barrier broke, but I was in your body then. So it doesn’t really count.” Chara’s voice turned tight. “Asriel, I really need you to look at me.”

He raised his head at that, hesitantly, as if staring at the sun. His wide, wet eyes shone like beacons in the growing shadow. Chara could see the way his silhouette had changed – he’d grown taller than Frisk, his clothes clinging loose to his bony frame, and it just made Chara more aware of how undersized Asriel’s hand-me-downs felt on his own body. The hard nodules of his horns were barely visible in the tangle of fur on his forehead. He didn’t speak. He didn’t blink.

“Hi,” Chara said, for want of anything better.

“Howdy,” Asriel said. Then he winced, and raised a hand to his head.

“What is it?”

“It’s just a headache. I’m fine.” He leaned forward a bit, then pointed at his forehead. “What happened to your-”

“It’s just a bruise. I’m fine.”

Seconds passed. Asriel’s bedframe creaked as he rocked back.

“I buried you,” he said to Chara. “The best I could, anyway. I took your old knife and some of the flower seeds and planted them on Mt. Ebott. I thought I was saying goodbye for the last time. But you were right there, weren’t you? Right beneath my feet.”

“Probably. I woke up in the garden after everyone had left. Not too different from what happened to you,” Chara said. “Frisk told me you figured it out before everyone else.”

“Well, I’m the one responsible, right?” He hung his head. “I think...when I had all the souls, I wasn’t totally in control of that power. I just wanted things to happen and they happened. Didn’t matter how much I wanted them, or if I knew I wanted them. I know you told me how much you wanted to finally sleep, but maybe part of me couldn’t accept it, and that’s why you came back. So it’s my fault. And I’m-”

Chara cut him off, voice calm. “Asriel. I already went through this with your parents. If you try to apologize for something you didn’t even know about, I’m going to get angry.”

“But I just-”

_“Don’t.”_

Asriel flinched. “Okay.” Then he tried to smile. “But geez, you must have been really bored down there, right? I guess I can relate. That’s why you came out.” He started to fidget with his shirt. “It makes sense. You didn’t come here right away so obviously you didn’t want to see me, we’d said our goodbyes and everything and I wasn’t such a great friend anyway.”

“I wanted to see you.”

Asriel looked up at that, hands frozen, eyes wide. Chara was in the same stance, looking shocked at himself. He had the expression of someone who’d said something they didn’t want to say or at least not in the way they’d said it, and now had to deal with the consequences.

“I always wanted to see you.” His words firmer, now. “I thought about you all the time. Even when I hated you.”

Asriel seemed to withdraw into himself; his voice turned hurt and small. “You hated me?”

“Of course I did.” He leaned forward, teeth bared like pearls in the dark and fists bunched on his knees. “You ruined _everything_ , Asriel. If it hadn’t been for you changing your mind at the last minute, our plan would have worked. Instead we both died, and I was _stuck._ I couldn’t move on. I was there for every useless minute of your parents and all the other monsters standing around and doing nothing but hoping for a miracle that wasn’t ever going to come. And every minute, I knew who to blame. I knew it was because of _you._

“But that wasn’t enough, was it?” he went on. “You had to come back to life. I was the one who’d already died once to get to the surface, but you still got a second chance and I didn’t. And all you did was whine about it. I hung around you for so many of your resets I lost count. Do you have any idea how boring it was, watching you throw your tantrums over not having a soul? At least you were still _here_. You could touch things. You could make yourself heard. You weren’t freezing cold _all the time._ ”

“But I wanted you back, too,” Asriel said hoarsely. Moisture was pooling at the corners of his eyes. “I was calling you for so long-”

“You wouldn’t _listen,”_ Chara snapped. “You don’t think I was trying to answer? But you were too wrapped up in yourself to pay attention. And when Frisk fell, you kept trying to get his attention instead. Do you have any idea how that felt? Seeing you confuse me for someone else after you’d spent all that time clinging to me before we died? And then,” he said, biting off each word, “after everything was done, and you got your body back, you stood in front of him, and you told him that I wasn’t a good person.”

“I would never say that,” Asriel whispered. “I wouldn’t.”

“You didn’t use those exact words, but I knew what you meant. You told him he was the kind of friend you really wanted all along. So that was it. After all that time, constantly calling my name, saying that we were friends, you met a stranger and practically told him that you’d have been better off if we’d never even met.”

Asriel was almost bent double where he sat, shoulders shaking, ears hanging free. He hiccupped and clutched at his sides.

Chara said, “And you were right.”

He looked up. “Huh?”

Now Chara had averted his eyes, staring at the window and the blackening sky. His pale skin turned him phantasmal against the dark.

“I’ve been thinking a lot since I came back,” he said quietly. “I didn’t do a lot of it before, really. I was...distracted. From the minute you found me lying there in the Ruins, I was busy making plans to get back to the surface. After I died, I spent all that time wanting to get revenge on everyone who’d left me behind. At some point I realized all I’d ever really done was try and come up with ways to hurt people.” He shook his head. “And I wasn’t even any good at it. The only ones who really got hurt were you and your dad. That hadn’t been part of the plan. I mean, only reason I’m still here is because I couldn’t even die right.”

He turned back to Asriel, who sat in rapt attention, sniffing back his tears. Chara’s weary, half-lidded gaze seemed to mesmerize him.

“Asriel, when you brought me home after you heard me calling for help...I think that was probably the biggest mistake you ever made. You didn’t know what you were bringing on yourself. What I’d wind up doing  to you. If I’d actually bothered trying to understand you instead of just pretending, maybe I would have realized you never could have gone through with taking the other human souls, no matter what you said. And the worst part is, I knew that if I came back, you and your family would take me in all over again. And I’d still be...this _._ ” He gestured helplessly at himself. “So, you’re wrong. I wanted to see you. I just didn’t want you to see me.”

Time passed. The last strip of sun coming in from the window had begun to recede.

“But you still came back,” Asriel said.

“Yeah,” Chara said. “One more thing I did wrong. I didn’t want...I was worried something had already gone wrong for everyone up here. I wanted to find out for myself. It looks like everything’s okay, for now. But I don’t think I’m going to stick around. I’m not supposed to be here anymore.” He shook his head. “It’ll be better if everyone just forgets about me.”

Asriel remained still for a minute. Then he rose, his stiff joints cracking like branches as he strode across the room and stood, unsmiling, over Chara, who looked up quizzically. His chest rose and fell. He appeared to reach a decision. And then he balled his fists, and reared back, and punched Chara very hard in the arm.

“Ow!” Chara cried, but more out of reflex than anything – Asriel’s fists were about as threatening as two tiny throw pillows. “What was that for!?”

“For being _stupid!”_ Asriel shouted back, and Chara yelped as he punched his other arm. “You were watching me the whole time? You saw everything I did to all those people and you think you can just sit there and act like it’s all your fault? What is _wrong_ with you!?”

“You only ended up that way because of what I did! If I hadn’t tricked you into going up to the surface, you never would have-”

“You didn’t trick me into anything, Chara.” The look on Asriel’s face made Chara push back across the bed until his shoulder blades were pressed up against the wall – Asriel’s fangs were bared, eyes red, his fur standing up in haggard spikes. “I knew exactly what I was doing when I helped you get those flowers. Yeah, I got cold feet at the end. That’s on _me_. And so is every single person I hurt just because I was too bored to find anything better to do. You weren’t controlling me, so you don’t get to have all the blame! _I’m allowed to screw up, too!”_

He relented at that; he stepped back, still breathing heavily. Chara didn’t budge. He tried to move a finger. It didn’t seem in any hurry to listen.

“It’s as hard as I thought it’d be, you know,” Asriel said. “Fitting in with everyone. Just because I look like _this_ again, people act like all those horrible things I did never happened. I’ve already told Mom and Dad pretty much everything and no matter how horrible the story gets they still hug me at the end and say everything’s going to be all right, and I can never tell if they get what I’m saying or if they’re just pretending to so I stay happy. The only person with any idea how I really was back then is Frisk, and he’s _Frisk_ , so of course he thinks the best of everyone anyway.” His glare glinted red. “I thought of all people, at least you would be able to understand.”

Chara felt unmoored from himself. This was not going the way he’d expected. He tried to inch himself off the bed, eyes darting towards the door as if expecting it to fly open any second.

“I think I should leave,” he managed to say. “You probably want to be alone-”

“No, I _don’t,”_ Asriel said, and his voice cracked like a pane of glass. “I hated being alone, Chara. Hated it. That was the worst part of not having my soul anymore. The way everyone I used to care about felt like a stranger and I knew I’d never be able to feel any other way about them no matter how hard I tried. I think I kept hurting all of them just so I didn’t have to care about it anymore. Maybe that’s why I wanted you back so badly. You were the only person left I hadn’t _ruined._ ” He sniffed. “And when I had everyone’s souls, and I thought I’d have to stay behind so no one else would worry about me anymore...you know, before Frisk talked me into leaving, I was almost looking forward to turning back again? That way, at least it wouldn’t bother me so much. And I know you understand that, because you felt the exact same way. I was there when you told Frisk about it. I know how unhappy you were.”

He spread his arms out wide, and even though the sunlight had almost left the room completely, Chara could still see him trying to smile.

“But you see?” he said. “I’m up here. I’m doing my best. So there’s no reason for you to run away again. I don’t...I d-don’t want you to feel that way anymore.” His arms dropped, and his breath started to hitch. “You were down there so long, even after you came back again. And you just kept h-hurting yourself, because you w-were afraid to see me...”

His words fell apart and dissolved like old tissue. Asriel’s tears started to flow. That was enough for Chara’s limbs to finally start working.

“Oh, no, not this again,” he groaned, and sprang up from the bed, but he didn't know what to do after. In all the time he’d known Asriel he’d tried everything he could to stop his crying except comforting him, and he couldn’t work out how. His hands waved uselessly in the general vicinity of Asriel’s face.

“Look, you’re upset, I get it,” he said. “But I’m here now, okay? Your parents are going to bust in if they hear you cracking up again. Just calm down!”

“I am calm,” Asriel sobbed, and buried his face in his sleeve. “It’s been a really long day, o-okay?”

Little by little, he got himself under control. Chara reached over and clicked on Frisk’s bedside lamp and they both flinched away as buttery light flooded the room.

“You can’t keep acting like this, Asriel,” Chara muttered. “All these years and you’re still a crybaby.”

“Yeah, well, you’re still an _idiot_ , so that makes us even.”

“Fine. Fair enough. If I’d have known you’d act like this, maybe I would have come down sooner.” His voice grew lower still. “Before Christmas, maybe.”

Asriel laughed a little at that, and lowered his arm. “Dad wore the suit again.”

“Of course he did.”

“But, Chara?” Asriel’s face turned solemn. “It gets easier, you know.”

“What does?”

“Being normal.” He started toying with his shirt again. “Being ‘good,’ I guess. For a long time, it just felt like I was pretending to be my old self when I was around everyone but Frisk. Kind of like the way I used to change my face, you remember? But lately...maybe I’ve just gotten really good at it, but sometimes whole days go by when I don’t feel like I’m pretending at all. So maybe I’m getting better. And that makes me think, if even someone like me can change, then I’m sure that anyone else can, right?” He knuckled away the last of his tears. “So don’t act like you’ve got no chance up here, Chara. It’s hard, but it gets easier.”

His gaze turned hopeful. Chara couldn’t look directly at it.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’ll think about it.” He gestured at the door. “But can we go now? If we stay here any longer your parents’ll start thinking we died again.”

Asriel nodded, and Chara nodded back, and quickly made his way to the door. As he turned away, he surreptitiously wiped his face with his sleeve.

“Hey, Chara?”

He stopped with his hand on the doorknob, and looked over his shoulder. “What now?”

Asriel stood in the middle of the room, one hand gently massaging his forehead. It took a moment for him to work out what to say next.

“I’m just curious about something. I know how you feel about humans, and you don’t really seem to care about monsters all that much either, so...” He lowered his hand. “Why me? What makes me so special? Is it just because we hung around each other for so long?”

Chara turned around fully, smirking a little. “You mean it’s not obvious?”

Asriel shook his head, and Chara’s smirk collapsed. He looked embarrassed.

“It was when I fell down,” he said. “I mean, that hadn’t been a very good day for me anyway, and I really hadn’t planned to go into that cave into the first place, and I’m used to being alone but I was starting to freak out a little thinking I was trapped at the bottom of a hole, and.” He seemed to be deflating as he spoke; his posture slumped, his voice grew quieter. “I was only crying like that because of how much it hurt and yeah, okay, I was a little scared, and then that was when. When you.”

Chara shrugged weakly.

“You came when I called,” he said. “You’re the only one who did.”

Chara stood in place for a moment. Then he walked toward Chara, his expression resolute. Chara looked wary, like he was expecting to get punched again, but then Asriel threw his arms around him and held him tight. Chara felt the heat of his fur baking through their clothes. He stiffened, then sighed.

“I was wondering when we’d get to this part,” he said. “Between you and your mom, I’m already getting a little worn out by all the-”

“Chara, just shut up and listen for a second, okay?” Asriel said. “I’ve made a lot of mistakes, but helping you wasn’t one of them. I never would have left you alone down there.” His grip tightened, claws digging into Chara’s shirt. “Even if I could take it back. If I could do it all again, knowing everything that’d happen to me if I answered you, I still would. I’d always bring you home.”

No answer. Chara stood in Asriel’s embrace, arms limp at his sides. Then, slowly, awkwardly, like he was learning as he went, he hugged Asriel back. Asriel spoke, his voice a little strained:

“Uh, Chara? You’re...you’re kind of squeezing me. Hard to breathe.”

“Sorry.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve put up with worse from Dad.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I said it was okay, you don’t have to-”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and Asriel felt moisture seeping through his shirt. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I’m s-sorry...”

He repeated the words until the words fell apart and he buried his face in Asriel’s shoulder and convulsed in his grip, so that Asriel had to clutch at him like a mast in a storm to keep them both upright, and his shirt grew soaked as Chara started to wail, his screams barely muffled against Asriel’s skin. Asriel’s eyes went wide, but he didn’t cry or let go. As the last of the sunlight slipped away from the windowsill like a trespasser, he kept holding on, and waited for the tremors to end.

*  *   *

Now it was the three of them, later that night. Toriel and Asgore had said their goodbyes and then she’d put them to bed. Chara was in a star-pattered sleeping bag between the two beds, staring up at the ceiling.

“Are you all right down there, Chara?” Asriel asked. “Mom said you could sleep on the couch downstairs if this isn’t comfortable.”

“It’s fine,” Chara said. “I’ve been way less comfortable than this.”

“We’ll get you a real bed this weekend,” Frisk said.

“It’s going to be kind of cramped in here, don’t you think, Frisk?” Asriel asked.

“Bunk beds.”

“Oh, bunk beds would be _awesome._ But that’d leave one of us out, wouldn’t it?”

“We can always trade off.”

“Like, every week, or-”

Chara said, “I’m trying to sleep, here.”

“Sorry,” Asriel said. Then: “Hey, Chara?”

“What?”

“I know Mom’s gonna be home-schooling you, but when she’s done, you think we’ll all be in the same class?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “But, speaking of which. Do the other kids give you any trouble?”

“No, they’re all pretty nice. They kind of teased me and Frisk at first because Mom was our teacher, but then we snuck out to Mt. Ebott and Mom gave us double homework forever and now I think they just feel sorry for us.”

“There was that one time Matthew said his dad could beat up our dad,” Frisk said. “Remember, Asriel? The one who’s always picking his nose?”

“Oh, yeah, that was funny.”

“I just turned to Asriel and asked for his opinion, and he said that-”

“I said that of course his dad could beat up our dad. _Anyone’s_ dad could beat up our dad.”

“ _I_ beat up our dad,” Frisk said.

“Our mom beat up our dad,” Chara muttered.

Silence dropped. Chara’s words unspooled like rope above their heads. Chara’s eyes had widened; he was grateful no one could see his face where he lay.

“Well, I’m pretty worn out,” Asriel said. “Goodnight, Frisk. Goodnight, Chara.”

“Night, Asriel,” Frisk said.

“Yeah,” Chara said. “Goodnight.”

His sleeping bag crinkled around him as he lay still and listened to their breathing, shallow at first, then growing heavy and regular. That was the only sound – no cars passed outside, no crickets sang. He blinked, then blinked again, and then sleep rose up to claim him like dark water.

Later that night he left them again.


	5. The Walk

He awoke from dreamless dark with moonlight in his eyes and a mouth tasting of sand. Pulse quickened, unsure of where he was, having writhed half out of the sleeping bag so his head had left the pillow and rubbed his cheek raw on the carpet’s nap. Then the events of the last two days returned to him, and he quietly groaned and rubbed sleep out of his eyes and wriggled the rest of the way out of the sleeping bag. He needed water.

The moon glowed sickly pale and he’d been sleeping square in the middle of that light pouring in from the single window; his shadow turned this way and that as he gazed around the room, vision adjusting to the murk. Frisk was curled up in bed, facing the wall, audibly snoring. Chara wasn’t surprised. On all the loops he’d witnessed at Frisk’s side, the child had barely ever taken a rest, even when he was barely able to move under the burden of his exhaustion, but when he actually brought his head down to a pillow he slept like a brick.

Asriel wasn’t faring so well. His blankets were thrashed about and his face and muzzle kept contorting; he whimpered in his sleep, hands clutching at nothing. Whether his restlessness was from headache or nightmare Chara couldn’t tell, but when he reached down to Asriel and rested his hand on his head, the soft warm fur sheathing the plate of bone, Asriel’s features smoothed, his cries ceased. He rolled over in bed, his breath steady now.

Chara turned away and left the room.

The door, again, made no sound as it opened and shut. His footsteps, again, were impossibly light against the floorboards. Truthfully he didn’t know why this happened either; it had been one more symptom of his return, a freight of strangeness he dragged in his wake. He didn’t make himself heard and he would swear Gyftrot and this family looked at him as if trying to focus on something out the corner of their eye. Now that he had left Mt. Ebott, more than ever he felt perpendicular to the world everyone else knew. Like if he just turned to the side, he would disappear completely.

The stairs were to his right but he went the other way and drifted into Toriel’s bedroom. This, too, was eerily reminiscent of the one she’d had in Home – the bed and desk and bureau all in the same places, a new cactus plant in the corner. Even her journal from Home was there on the desk, its cover cracked and hard-worn. Chara left it untouched and walked over to where Toriel slept. She was less dignified now, snoring gently with her fur cowlicked and her hand occasionally grasping at someone unfelt to her side; if she’d awoken then she would have seen him, hovering over her with eyes dark as scorchmarks.

He had done something like this, a long time ago, when Asgore had eaten their pie and fallen ill. Chara had found it amusing at first, the intimidating hulk of the Monster King dispatched by a badly cooked dessert, but when his sickness worsened and Asriel’s worry deepened into hysterics that even Chara couldn’t stop, he’d felt the first touch of fear since falling into the Underground, brushing like petals at his spine. If Asriel’s father died, Asriel would hate Chara for it. If Asriel hated him, then all chance of going to the surface was lost. That, Chara had reasoned, was the reason he was afraid. It was the only reason. He’d told himself that even as he swallowed the flowers himself and felt the blistering sores ravage him like a swarm of hornets crawling through his guts.

When that idea had first occurred to him he’d been so struck by its perfection that he’d snuck into the feverish, delirious Asgore’s room to tell him personally. Stood over by his sickbed the same way he stood by Toriel’s now. Chara had assured him it would all turn out okay in the end. That this time, the only people who suffered would be the ones who deserved it. Looking back, he didn’t think he’d made his point as well as he could have. But Asgore hadn’t remembered any of it anyway; he’d been too insulated from the world by his sickness for any of Chara’s words to reach. It had been for nothing. The same as everything else.

Even in sleep, Toriel looked tired.

Out of the bedroom, down the stairs. Asriel’s photographs winking in the moonlight and the kitchen linoleum glistening like pearl. The digital clock beneath the TV said it was almost two in the morning.

Chara turned on the kitchen faucet, stuck his head beneath the stream and drank deep. When he turned away, wiping his mouth, he saw the neat stack of books on the kitchen table. Frowning, he flipped open a large spiral notebook filled with dividers, each of them clearly labeled. _English. History. Science (Gen). Mathematics (Remedial)._

He closed the book and put it down. The air in this house had gotten stifling, all of a sudden. He looked out the kitchen, past the living room, and to the front door. Through the windows he could see the empty street and unlit houses made phantasmal in the starry night.

He straightened every picture frame on his way out of the house.

Asphalt digging like fingernails into his soles. The night air biting cold through his clothes, a breeze that smelled of woodsmoke and dust. He moved like a sleepwalker, arms limp and head lolled, following the double painted lines in the middle of the road, daring any cars to come by and light him white as bone in their headlights’ blaze. But nobody came. Every window blind and every door locked. Like these houses were all facades, unoccupied. The illusion of other lives.

He kept walking because it felt good to walk, the rasp of the road underfoot and the tug of gravity on his joints. In the distance he could see the road leading into the sharptoothed craze of bare-limbed woods and the monolithic silhouette of Mt. Ebott, the moon perched atop its peak like a cataract-filmed eye. The town quiet as a sepulcher, the merest rustle of a bush enough to carry for blocks. He tried to imagine its inhabitants in their beds or slumped in front of television sets and couldn’t. He tried to think of the days ahead and his mind went numb. He felt his body as keenly as if it was tied together with string and thought it might unravel at any moment. And then he was struck by a vision of these houses gone two-dimensional, falling over like stage props and leaving only the bare earth behind, and then the earth falling away in clots, and the blackened shapes of trees falling apart like ash, and then the moon falling like a dropped coin to disappear beneath Ebott’s shadow and the stars all gone meteorite through the velvet night to leave trails of dust that would fall away as well, all fallen, all undone, until there was only the mountain’s shadow grown indistinguishable from the world of shadow that remained. Him alone in the dark. And then, the cold, creeping back in.

Either the world was broken or he was.

Hopeless, either way.

It wasn’t until he felt the burning in his chest and throat that he realized he’d started to run, his bare feet slapping metronomic on the asphalt even as the rocks chewed them up raw, and that seemed like a good idea so he ran faster, arms bent, head bowed, these hollow homes streaking past. He felt the stab of a stitch in his gut but gulped air and just ran faster even as the pain wracked him side to side and made his eyes gush wet and his breath turn to sobbing, it wasn’t so bad, the poison had been worse and the death-winter worse still, he could endure like he always had before. He ran like he wanted to burst out from his skin. And all the while, Ebott’s shade grew larger.

His maddened sprint decayed into a lurching, crippled jog as time went on but he refused to stop moving. He kept one hand pressed against the throbbing pain in his side and didn’t look back as the town’s rooftops grew smaller. When the road cut into the woods and the night grew yet darker from the crosshatched branches eating up the sky, he finally tripped; his knee turned inward and he hit the ground and skidded and stayed there for a moment, drenched in sweat, dry-heaving from exertion. He pushed himself up to his knees and risked a glance behind him. Nothing there but empty road. If a car should come by, its headlights would snare him like a bug. No way to flee from that.

He turned and went into the woods.

The leaves rattled like laughter as he pushed through the brush. Dry branches lashed at his face and whipped through the thin fabric of his pajamas. He tried to keep his bearings. Mt. Ebott wasn’t hard to miss. If he just got far enough off the main road he could keep going from there. No point in resting. The mountain was the better part of a day’s journey away.

But his legs gave out again nonetheless, so he collapsed face-first in the dry undergrowth smelling of fermented earth. He’d wound up in a clearing, of sorts, the trees encircling a rough circle of tall grass and scrub. One tree had fallen, sheared off at the base by strong winds or lightning, and it lay between him and the path ahead like a barrier.

He got to his feet.

“You did it once, you can do it again.” Talking to himself, still breathless. “You did it once, you can do it again.”

“That’s the spirit. Heh heh.”

Chara’s blood ran cold.

Footsteps, behind him. The rhythm of rustling leaves, punctuating by snapping branches that sounded thin as twigs and then huge as saplings. Far too close already. He turned his head with effort, all his limbs suddenly molasses-sluggish, and saw those white pinprick pupils shining like will-o’-the-wisps at the clearing’s periphery, bobbing ever nearer.

“Had a feeling that if I kept an eyesocket on you then I’d see you get up to something eventually,” he said. “And now here we are. No one else around. Heh. I guess patience really is a virtue.”

That wide frozen grin faded in as if crystallizing from the dark, followed by the rest of the skull. He stood mere yards from Chara, hands in his hoodie pockets, eyesockets wide and unblinking.

“Heya,” said Sans. “You’ve been busy, huh?”

The first time he’d seen Sans and Asriel meet underground he hadn’t really seen anything at all. Asriel’s daily tortures of the monsters were already getting dull, and when he’d encountered this squat skeleton whose hoodie was quilted with suspicious stains and who spoke like he was always on the verge of a yawn, Chara had just been waiting for him to collapse to dust like all the others. But then there had been a thunderclap and a blinding light, and an impression of howling skulls, and nothing but a charred and twitching husk where Asriel had been. He’d made a game attempt of it, resetted a dozen times to strike back, but Sans had still obliterated him on sight and seemed to be catching on a little quicker every time. So Asriel had avoided him from then on. And Chara had remembered what he’d seen.

When Chara had finally regained his soul the first time and encountered Frisk face to face, in a bubble of stagnant time generated by the broken remnant of Dr. Gaster, Sans had stood in his defense. He’d made an ultimatum – Chara’s slaying of the doctor could be forgiven, but hurting Frisk would end in violence. Chara had backed off, even then. He'd known that he could pick a better moment to strike later. He didn’t have any such opportunity now.

The space around Sans seemed, briefly, to twist like a spirograph and made Chara go cross-eyed. When he blinked Sans was gone, but his voice emerged from the brush behind him.

“Gotta say, I just about had to pick my jaw off the ground when I heard you’d shown your face again. No one stays dead these days, seems like. I almost wanted to run home and make sure W.D. wasn’t hiding in a cupboard someplace. You remember him, right? The guy you _murdered?”_ Bare phalanges scraped across bark and Chara turned to face the noise, but Sans had already moved again. “But, no luck. Heh. No skeletons in any of my closets.”

Chara staggered woodenly through the leaves, trying to find a way out, but he caught glimpses of Sans’ grin everywhere he looked. He couldn’t breathe.

“What’s the problem?” Sans said. “Didn’t you do something like this to Frisk and me when we all met? Turnabout’s always funny, kid. Come on. _This is where you’re supposed to laugh._ ”

Chara’s teeth were grit so hard he thought they’d crack. He turned to the fallen tree. If he got enough of a running start, he thought he could vault over it and keep moving from there.

“I guess you’ve had enough setup.” Sans’ voice was suddenly right behind him and Chara whirled and saw nothing there. “Time for the punchline.”

He turned around again and saw that grin looming in front of him huge and smooth as line of tombstones. A scream rose up in his throat.

Sans reached out and flicked him across the nose.

It was a harmless gesture but Chara was so on edge that it hit him like a shotgun blast; he staggered back, wide-eyed and hands over his face, then slipped and fell into another drift of dry leaves. It took him a moment to realize he was still alive.

“There.” Sans stuck his hand back in his pocket. “Justice is served. Heh heh.”

Chara got his mouth working, eventually. “What?”

“What, what? I said I’d put the whole W.D. thing behind me, remember? I don’t joke around when it comes to promises, kid.” His pupils flickered. “Don’t get me wrong, I still don’t _like_ you much, but I’m willing to believe that you were just defending yourself back then. And whatever happened to bring you back, I doubt you’re gonna try and destroy all of time and space out in your jim-jams.”

The leaves crunched and Sans’ blocky frame stood over him, blotting out the stars.

“I mean, geez, you didn’t even bother to put shoes on. People throw broken bottles and stuff into these woods, that’s just not safe.” He offered his hand again. “Here, up we go-”

Chara scrabbled away from him and leapt to his feet. His eyes darted to the nearest break in the trees, the dark expanse of woods. Sans tilted his head, the bone of his eyesockets crinkling at the edges.

“Still eyeing the exit, huh?” He scratched his skull. “All right. Let me see if I can connect the dots, here. Frisk told me that just before Asriel broke the barrier, you said that any life we tried to build on the surface would end badly. Humans would turn on us the same as before, right?” Chara didn’t answer. “At the time, I thought you were just being a sore loser. But, hypothetically speakin’, if someone really did feel that way, it’d probably take more than a couple days of hugs and apologies to change their minds. C’mon, kiddo, throw me a bone. Am I hot or cold?”

“Tell me I’m wrong,” Chara said.

Sans blinked. “’scuse me?”

“I’ll believe it if you say it.” He stepped forward, and something in the lines of his face caused Sans to take a step back. “You’re here to keep me from leaving, aren’t you? Then tell me I’m wrong.” His voice started to shake. “You’ve got to promise me it’s going to be okay.”

“Um.” San’s pupils darted to the edge of his sockets and back. “Not to say I ain’t flattered, but what made you start valuing my opinion so much?”

“You’re different from the rest. You know what it’s like. The resets. Waiting for everything to fall apart any minute.” He was getting louder. “That’s half the reason I left the last time! What’s the point of staying if it’s all going to fall apart? Everyone else keeps ignoring it! They think that if they just smile and act normal then it’ll all be okay and that’s what they want me to do, too!” He clutched his scalp, pulled hard at his hair. “I don’t know how to be normal. I never got enough _practice!”_

“Whoa, whoa, easy.” Sans was in front of him, bony hands gently gripping Chara’s wrists. “How’s about you let go, okay? Deep breath. Man, no wonder you and Asriel got along so well, you’re like two neurotic little peas in a pod.”

Chara shook off his grip and stood there, sniffling. Sans sighed and backed off.

“So you’re tellin’ me you’ll be okay if I say that nothing’s going to go wrong up here?” Chara nodded, and Sans averted his gaze. “Then I’m sorry, kid. I can’t tell a lie that big. Good times don’t last forever. That’s what makes them good times.”

Chara let out a broken little laugh and wiped his cheeks.

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “So just let me go. I’m not going to hurt anyone else.”

“Except yourself, seems like.”

“No more than usual.”

“Not too reassuring. From what I understand your ‘usual’ is pretty bad.”

Sans craned his head up, and stayed that way for so long that Chara thought he’d fallen asleep on his feet. But then he said, “Let me tell you a story, first. Stars are nice tonight. I’m okay chilling out here for a while.”

“You’re not going to just let me walk away, are you.”

“It won’t kill you to catch your breath for a second.” He ambled over to the fallen tree and sat down, his hands dangling between his knees. “Haven’t told this to anyone yet, actually. Never expected to tell _you._ But I kind of feel like a jerk now, messin’ with your head like that. And…I get the feeling you’d appreciate this better than Frisk would.”

Chara stared. Then he cautiously approached the tree trunk and sat down beside him. The bark nipped through the seat of his pants.

Sans said, “You ever wonder why I’m always doing this? Joking around, pulling pranks?”

“Because it hides the way you really feel about people.”

“What? No. Because it’s _hilarious.”_ His grin widened at Chara’s pained expression, then he looked back to the stars. “But also, I sort of had to make up for the rest of my family. You could mark your calendar by how often W.D. told a joke, assuming you figured out what the heck he was saying in the first place. And Papyrus? Don’t let his attitude fool you, he takes everything dead seriously. That includes his current gig. Anyone tell you what that was?”

“I heard he was the monsters’ ambassador to the humans,” Chara said, deadpan. “That must have been a relief to everyone.”

“Yeah, the job was supposed to go to Frisk but would you believe it, the tired grade-schooler didn’t want to jump headfirst into a life of diplomacy. So Papyrus took the offer and ran. For a while I just thought he got caught up in the heat of the moment, seeing the surface for the first time and all, but then we went on a little trip across the country and it turned out he hadn’t forgotten about the job at all, on account of how he kept going into the most crowded places he could find and shouting, ‘Greetings, humans! I am the monsters’ ambassador!’ And then asking them if they had any questions.” Chara cringed. “Yeah, not exactly keeping a low profile. But the thing is, it _worked._ Sure, we ran into some skepticism and more than a little screaming, but when humans figured out that we were here to stay I guess they all went, ‘Darn, who should we talk to about this whole human-monster thing? How about that six-foot skeleton who keeps telling everyone he’s their ambassador?’ Nice, right? Suddenly Pap’s got more ‘friends’ than he knows what to do with.

“So he keeps at it. And I basically get caught up in the tide. Papyrus works his tailbone off but he’s got no head for paperwork so I handle that, and I tag along to all his meetings to make sure none of the humans pull a fast one, and I’m trying to help out your mom and dad where I can too, and honestly, I’m used to long hours but I’d kind of been hoping for some R&R after the barrier broke. And Papyrus notices me getting worn down, so he keeps trying to cheer me up in his usual way, and maybe it sort of does the _opposite_ of cheering me up after a while.” Sans’ words had turned biting, and he’d started to gesture in a way that made Chara scootch a little further down the tree trunk. “Maybe one day I lose my cool a little bit. Maybe I say something like, ‘Hey, Paps? Papy? Brother, buddy, pal? You know I’m with you all the way, but how about you lay off a little bit? Because all these humans you’re cozying up to are only happy with us because they think we’re one big joke, and when the joke suddenly stops being funny, who do you think is gonna find out first? I know you’re having fun with this job and all, but sometimes it feels like I’m just helping you paint a bullseye on your back.’”

He slumped over and fell silent, propping up his head with one hand. For a while the only sound was the chitter of nameless animals deep in the brush.

“And then what happened?” Chara asked hesitantly.

“Yeah, I was a little worried how he’d react once I’d finished shooting my mouth off. Usually when Papyrus hears something he doesn’t like he just shrugs it off or makes the best of it, but this time he went real quiet. Got this thoughtful look on his face. And then he looked at me, and he asked, ‘Then what should I do?’”

Sans laughed loud enough to make Chara flinch, and he threw his hands in the air.

“And what am I supposed to say to that, huh? Should I have told him to just go hide in a basement with a sack over his head? Run back to Mt. Ebott before the humans throw us in there themselves? Or, hey, stop me if you’ve heard this one before – kill or be killed! Take out a human, grab a soul, finish the war before another one has a chance to start?” His hands dropped; he shook his head. “No. That’s not Papyrus. That’s not any way to live. He really is doing his best to help everyone.” He turned to Chara, his grin rueful. “And here I am, doing my best right along with him.”

“Sounds to me like you’re just fooling yourself so that he’ll stay happy,” Chara said.

“Heh. Maybe. And maybe your mom’s fooling herself so her kids will all stay happy.” Chara winced. “That’s how she looks out for them. The king’s doing the same. Frisk and Asriel, Alphys and Undyne, monsters and humans. All of ‘em just kidding themselves and each other.” The starlight lay cold on Sans’ skull. “But I don’t think too many people really believe there’s any such thing as happily ever after. They all know trouble’s coming eventually. They’re bracing for it, in their own ways. And who knows? Maybe if they’re all bracing for it together, then when it comes, they’ll barely feel it at all. Then again,” he added, “maybe not. But they’re still trying, all the same.”

Chara lowered his head, stared at his feet.

“So then I guess it’s my turn to ask,” he said. “What should I do?”

“Hey, kid? Chara? Between you and me, I’m really not qualified to give life advice.” Then Chara felt Sans’ bony hand squeezing his shoulder and looked up to see that permanent smile turned to him, as bright and inscrutable as ever. “But I do think you should at least try and take better care of yourself. Because someone definitely cares a lot about you.”

Chara bit his lip and said nothing. He shrugged away Sans’ hand, then climbed off the tree trunk and took a few steps, the dry leaves prickling the webs between his toes. He looked back the way he came. The woods and the empty road beyond.

“It’s a long way back,” he said quietly.

“Not as long as you think.”

“I’m going to give them nothing but trouble.”

“Oh, yeah,” Sans said, his voice bone-dry. “After everything _your_ family’s been through, I bet that another mouth to feed will be the last straw. Trust me, that ain’t the case. When your mom dropped the news on me yesterday I kind of suggested she watch her back around you for a little bit, and she just about bit my head off. Serves me right, I guess.”

“Fine. You made your point.” He hung his head a little, his back still turned to Sans. “And thanks. For not killing me. I guess.”

“Nah, no point. When I saw you first go into the woods I did something way worse.”

He turned around. “What?”

Sans had pulled his cell phone out of his hoodie. He made a quick text, then offhandedly waved it at Chara.

“I called your parents,” he said.

Chara felt his expression shift just as Sans flipped the phone around and snapped a picture. The flash was bright as a star and he yowled and staggered back, one arm flung over his eyes.

“Heh heh. Now there’s a face to remember.” He pocketed the phone again. “Think I might make that my new wallpaper.”

Chara lowered his arm, blinking away the dancing dots of glare in his vision, skin gone paler than usual. “They’re going to-”

“They’re going to be fine, kid. I convinced ‘em to keep their distance until I heard your side of things first and that was the hardest part, believe me.” The rough purr of engines trundled through the still night. “Hey, there they are. I tossed out a couple bones to mark where you left the road. Learned that trick from Asriel, actually.”

Out here the dark was so complete that the merest glimmer was impossible to miss. Through the gaps in the trees Chara saw a milky glow drifting like a ghost, and it stilled, and dimmed, as the engines went silent. He heard familiar voices.

Sans’ footsteps crunched up behind him.

“People like that are such a hassle, aren’t they?” he said. “No matter how many times we screw up or run off, they’ll always be there to welcome us home.” He put his hand on Chara’s shoulder again, and this time, Chara didn’t shrug it off. “I dunno about you, but it makes it kinda hard for me not to give it my all.”

“Can you come with me?” he asked quietly. “It’ll make it easier.”

“Heh. Sure. Want to hang around a little longer? Get yourself ready?”

“Let’s go now.”

He stepped forward and Sans’ fingers slipped away.

Chara said, “I’ve got school in the morning.”

He walked amongst the gaunt trees and parted their branches like curtains. Overhead the stars cast their shine fierce enough to break through the woods’ skeletal canopy, and though the moon had long dipped behind Mt. Ebott’s shadow, he made his way by that light. It was still hard to see, and his ragged feet and aching muscles protested his every step, but he still continued, pace unhurried and unbroken. And then he saw another light off in the distance, a twinkling circle that broke apart the shadows like black glass. The voices grew louder. He took a deep breath. Battered but determined, wiping away his tears, Chara followed the sound of people calling his name.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Thank you for reading.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3dC4bHlNCr4)


End file.
